Google Tanslate

Select Language

Sign up and be the first to know

About Hugh Terry & The Digital Insurer

Hugh Terry & The Digital Insurer Video

Contact Us

1 Scotts Road
#24-10 Shaw Centre
Singapore 228208

Write an article

Get in touch with the editor Martin Kornacki

email your ideas at [email protected]

Pre Registration Popup

itcasia2020 Registration Popup

Share Popup

Prime Member: Find out more

Access a unique programme!
  • 56 pre recorded lesson of online content from industry experts over 7 courses
  • The best in digital insurance for practitioners and by practtioners
  • Online MCQ after each lesson
  • Join the discussion forum and make new friends
  • Certificate upon completion to show your expertise and comitment
  • 3 months to complete
  • Normal price US$1,400 Your Prime member price is US$999
  • Access to future versions included in your Prime membership!
Become a member

Prime Member: Contact Us

Reach out to us. Please fill up the form below
Let us know how we can help. You can expect a response within 24 hours
Services of interest
Untitled

Arthur D. Little

Arthur D. Little has been at the forefront of innovation since 1886. We are an acknowledged thought leader in linking strategy, innovation and transformation in technology-intensive and converging industries. We enable our clients to build innovation capabilities and transform their organizations. ADL is present in the most important business centers around the world. We are proud to serve most of the Fortune 1000 companies, in addition to other leading firms and public sector organizations. For further information, please visit www.adlittle.com

SightCall make Insurance easier when you see what the customer sees

This week's article from InsurTech Weekly is Insurance is easier when you can see what the customer sees. Rick Huckstep leads The Digital Insurer in Europe and produces Insurtech Weekly.

Connecting with Customers

SightCall is on a mission to change the way companies communicate with customers and colleagues. In a recent Skype call with Thomas Cottereau, CEO and Emanuel Lapierre, Vice President of Sales, they told me: “We are passionate about a connected world. Universal access to live video frees people from blind communications. It helps all parties understand so much better than simply relying on the written word.”

Created in 2008, SightCall began by developing solutions for video conferencing. Over the years, they’ve progressed from start-up to scale-up and have enriched the basic offer by designing new apps to meet customer demands. SightCall have now settled in California and raised nearly $14million to date.

Interestingly, the company originally started off with an API-based approach to enable clients to integrate the SightCall tech into their own systems. But they soon learnt that clients wanted a complete solution. To address that need, an end-to-end product was built running on dedicated platforms around the world that SightCall own and control.

Now, the firm has grown to over 1,200 customer engagements in multiple industry sectors. And they claim to have one of the most complete WebRTC (Real-Time Communications) platforms in the market.

“Our target market is claims between $500 and $10,000”, explained Thomas. “Below $500, self-service is the right model for handling small value claims. Bigger than $10k and it makes sense to send an adjustor out. But in this space in the middle, where there is a massive volume of claims, this is where we focus.

“We start by engaging the customer. We’ve built SightCall with the customer first. They want to be part of the process of assessing the loss and agreeing the valuation. This is the biggest source of conflict because customers don’t accept the valuation they are given.

“But customers are not loss adjustors. They don’t always know what an insurer needs to see. Which is why SightCall lets the customer and the agent work together to assess the loss.”

This POV is supported by evidence from the high levels complaints that are upheld by regulators. (This link takes you to the FCA complaints page where there are detailed breakdowns, by product and by insurance firm of the number of complaints and how many are upheld.)

The Goldilocks effect

How many times have you heard that the basis for a complaint is simply that the customers do not agree with the insurer’s valuation? There will always be insurers who set out to low ball a claim and we trust in the regulators to hunt them down and sort them out.

balanceBut in the main, from my experience, insurers want to pay the right amount, not too much, not too little.

Just right!

And customers are the same, aren’t they?

Interestingly for me, as I was talking with Thomas, it was clear how aligned he was in his thinking with the team from RightIndem. Even though they are 5,351 miles apart, Dave Stubbs and Graham Blaney are coming at this insurance industry problem with the same mind-set.

It’s a no brainer when you think about it. By engaging the client in the claims process, you get much levels of satisfaction and incur much lower costs.

I will be featuring the RightIndem story in a few weeks and you’ll hear it for yourselves from Dave and Graham then.

sitecall-logo

Engaging with Customers

SightCall currently work with two of the world’s largest insurers who use their Visual Claims platform to provide visual, live interactions between customers and their insurance agents.

A key feature of SightCall is its ability to integrate into the insurer’s customer management system. Last year, SightCall announced its latest feature through its partnership with Salesforce.com. This enables the insurance agent to instigate the video session with the policyholder direct from within the Salesforce.com application.

We have developed our own video technology, our own IP, and our own global network”, explained Emanuel. “This allows us control to run video over the Internet and adjust video quality according to the bandwidth available. We then integrate our platform into insurers’ back-end systems or through Salesforce.com”.

The SightCall experience can be easily integrated into existing claims management or agent consoles. There is no need to replace existing CRM or call centre environments, saving time, money and resources.

For customers SightCall Visual Claim is part of your mobile or web app allowing them to have live interaction with your agent with the touch of a button.

The key here is that for one of these carriers, they justified SightCall on an operational efficiency agenda. It was simply a more cost effective way of doing business.

However, the true value was realised after the event. The levels of customer satisfaction rose beyond expectations because customers were now engaged with the insurer in a way that they were no before. (Incumbents focus internally, InsurTechs focus on the customer.)

How does SightCall work? 

As the first step, an insurance agent sends an SMS or email to the customer containing a link to start a video session. The customer clicks on the link and starts the video with the back camera of their phone.

sitecall-dashboard

Next, the agent logs into Salesforce.com and initiates the SightCall app from within their Salesforce screen. The agent views the video and in real-time, they guide the customer with a series of actions to aid a speedy resolution.

The insurance agent can take control of the video session if necessary, turning on the flashlight and pausing the video. The claimant can then draw on the image to highlight the damaged parts and then save the image to the claim.

This allows the agent to understand what the issue is. In addition, annotations can be added and pictures shared. The agent can also take screen shots and add them to the CRM record.

Finally, using geo-location, a notification is sent to the claimant with confirmation of the physical location of the call.

See how it works in this short video.

Convergence of adjacent industries

Set to launch next month, the SightCall Claim solution will be implemented on a mobile-to-mobile basis for a major insurer in the US. This will enable the insurer to pass the mobile call real-time to a third party, such as a tradesman or an auto-repair shop or a retailer. This is all intended to further speed up the claims settlement process.

And by keeping control of the discussion with the third party, the insurer gets to keep all the traffic within the network and have a full record of the interaction.

The way it works is simple. At FNOL (first notification of loss), the claim is logged with the insurer. In real-time, the insurance agent (sitting in their comfy, low cost location) can transfer the video call direct to a registered third party whilst still having full visibility of the interaction.

For example, the claimant reports a leak to the insurer. The agent takes the details, then patches in a plumber who is already registered with the insurer (with pricing and terms already agreed). The plumber can advise the claimant on any immediate actions, assess the size of the job and make arrangements to fix it.

All of this is within the FNOL session, controlled by the insurance agent and recorded for posterity! 

sitecall-console

In Conclusion

There’s no doubt that video tech is the way to go for claims. This is a Win-Win for both parties.

All the evidence shows that customers have much higher levels of satisfaction when they know what’s happening to their claim, that it has been assessed fairly and that it will be paid quickly.

Insurers win by reducing their cost of claims handling and the levels of fraudulent or exaggerated claims.

Real-time video removes the ability of fraudsters to Photoshop damage onto images supplied with a written claims form (anecdotally, claims managers tell stories about seeing the same “evidence” photo up to 50 times”). Add to this geo-location to substantiate to the evidence together with the insurance agent keeping in control of the video session, and it is easy to see how cost of claims levels will be improved.

What SightCall have done by building their own tech solution, and then integrating it with Salesforce, is pretty cool. The integration with a major customer management platform like Salesforce gives insurers a big gain by reducing the amount of effort implementing the solution.

And where SightCall gives a different approach to other InsurTech video solutions is that they have built a cross-industry solution. This way they can leverage features and functions across different user bases and provider a broader tech solution as a result.

Related Articles by Rick Huckstep

Here are links to InsurTech firms in related articles on insurance claims and VideoTech

360Globalnet(VideoTech, crowdsourcing, self service, analytics, claims)

Claimable(Agile, mobile, SaaS, claims platform, self-service)

Vis.io(VideoTech, claims, self-service)

Seegnature (formerly called LiveMed)(VideoTech, customer on-boarding, claims)

FluttrBox(Drones, claims, risk assessment)

Vlocity (SaaS Insurance platform built on Salesforce.com)

The author, Rick Huckstep, is an InsurTech thought leader and editor of InsurTech Weekly for The Digital Insurer.

Comments

Livefest 2019 Register Popup Event

Livefest 2019 Already Registered Popup Event

Livefest 2019 Join Live Logged-in Not Registered

Livefest 2019 Join Live Not Logged-in