Businesses can try to be prepared for every eventuality, but accidents can happen. Someone could trip in the workplace, your systems could come under cyber-attack, or policy changes could hit your bottom line hard. Even natural disasters are a possibility, however unlikely. A good risk management process certainly helps, but you still need to be prepared to take action if disaster still strikes.
In this article, we’ll discuss the challenges associated with making an insurance claim and how to overcome these challenges using a claims management solution.
Why You Need a Solution for Claims Management
Dealing with the incident itself is important, so you need to have an incident management procedure in place. But you also need to account for the financial pitfalls that come with incidents (injured workers needing medical attention and time off, damaged property needing repair or replacement, etc.).
This can be done by purchasing different types of insurance to account for all possible financial issues your business may face. Insurance types include workers’ compensation (which is required by law), general liability, warehouse claims, business interruption insurance, product liability insurance, and more depending on your industry and specific business needs.
You may need to file claims for an incident on more than one insurance policy, possibly with multiple insurance companies. A robust claims management process will help with that, and so will knowing different insurance carriers’ claims processes. But these are often not enough to be able to manage all your claims efficiently without errors. The insurance claims process inevitably involves a lot of paperwork, so filing the claim is prone to errors, especially if you do it manually.
Fortunately, there’s a way to overcome these issues and streamline your claims management process: claims automation.
4 Benefits of Using a Claims Management Solution
Claims management, as mentioned above, can be complicated. It involves many steps such as claims processing and claims administration and several stakeholders (such as the company board, relevant managers and supervisors, and most importantly, the insurance companies themselves) need to be kept in the loop throughout the process. Using insurance claims management software is the best way to ensure that the claims are processed and filed efficiently and with no errors. Here are some more benefits of using claims management and administration software such as Pulpstream:
1. Your Bottom Line Will Improve
The steps involved and the sheer amount of paperwork at every stage make manual claims management very time-consuming. Your claims teams’ time would be better used in decision-making processes and other revenue-generating business operations.
Using a software solution to automate your claims process would free up your team’s time, improving productivity and reducing operating costs. This increased efficiency would thus increase your bottom line.
2. Your Claims Become More Accurate
As mentioned before, the insurance claims process involves several steps and a lot of paperwork. This is especially true if an incident requires you to file claims with multiple insurance service providers. With so much documentation and multiple things to keep in mind, doing it all manually can easily go wrong. You may forget to include a specific repair or cost, or keeping the insurance adjuster may take a backseat over other tasks.
Automation would assist with repetitive tasks, paperwork, as well as all communications, considerably reducing the possibility of errors.
3. Your Company Board Gets Better Support With Decision-Making
The most prominent uses of claims management solutions are in the form of reduced paperwork and automated communications, but those are not all they’re useful for. An intelligent claims management platform using artificial learning and machine learning adds functionalities that can help you make better decisions as a company.
Advanced analytics capabilities can help track trends and patterns in incidents, which could fix gaps in your incident and risk management processes. The claims management system can also automate the visualization of these patterns which aids the higher-ups in effective and efficient decision-making.
4. You Can Easily Stay in Touch With Everyone in the Process
Communication with key stakeholders including your insurance service providers, company board members, and relevant employees (as well as customers, if relevant) is a critical part of the insurance claims process. But with so many people needing notifications at different times of the claims lifecycle (especially if you have claims with multiple insurance companies), keeping on top of these communications could mean critical errors if done manually.
With claims management software, you can configure it to automatically alert stakeholders to any updates. With good third-party integrations, these communications could even be sent to regular messaging apps, meaning people don’t even have to log in to a specific app or system.
5 Features to Look for in a Claims Management Platform
Now that you know why it’s important and beneficial to use a claims management solution, the next step is to find one that will fit your needs. As with any software, the features of the claims management system you choose need to fit your specific industry and business needs. But there are a few features that would make the claims management workflows smoother and more efficient for any business or industry.
Here are some features to look for while browsing for the right claims management solution for you:
1. Easy Access to All Relevant Documentation
One thing common to all insurance claims everywhere is that they require loads of documentation. You, as the claimant, need to submit as much evidence as possible to show that you’re not making a fraudulent claim. The insurance company will then look through this documentation using whatever fraud detection methods they have before deciding whether to approve or reject your claim.
So, for a claims management solution to make the claims process easy, it needs to have robust document management capabilities. It should allow you to upload and store relevant documents and evidence in any format (including video), ideally using any device. It should also allow easy access to these documents whenever needed.
2. Automated Notifications to Stakeholders
Communication is essential in any business process. It’s doubly important in claims management — especially regular updates and communication with the insurance companies and adjusters. It’s easy for insurance providers to assume that a missed update means you’re hiding something, which could have disastrous consequences for your claim.
This is one of the main issues a claims management platform can help overcome, so if it lacks a communication functionality, that’s a massive red flag. You should be able to set it up to provide real-time notifications and updates to specified stakeholders including internal ones such as board members and employees, third-party administrators like your insurance broker, and the insurance companies themselves.
3. Sophisticated Analytics Tools
While this is not vital for your claims management process itself, it’s an immensely useful functionality to have in a software solution. Sophisticated analytics using artificial intelligence and machine learning can help you make the most of the fact that you’re having to file insurance claims at all.
Using analytics, you can find patterns in incidents, visualize the data to identify gaps in your risk management processes, and help your company make better decisions overall.
4. A User-Friendly, Intuitive Dashboard
What’s the point of having software to make your tedious claims management easier if the software itself is hard to use and learn? User-friendliness is something you should always look for in any digital solution you use for your business, and claims management is definitely one of those. Your claims solution should have a dashboard that is user-friendly and intuitive enough that new users can be onboarded onto the platform quickly and easily.
5. No-Code Customization Capabilities
No matter how good a fit any claims management solution is, you would probably still need to tweak it slightly to match your business rules and meet your needs exactly. So any such solution must be configurable to suit your needs. It’s also a bonus if you can make these customizations without coding expertise, as that saves you from needing to coordinate your requirements with your IT team all the time (or hiring an IT professional just for claims management).
Apart from these features and functionalities of the platform itself, it’s also good to look at practical issues related to using any SaaS platform. This may include their customer service (ask questions like, “How quickly do they respond to queries?” and “How much support do they provide with the set-up?”) or whether their pricing even fits your budget (after all, there’s no point looking at a solution if you wouldn’t be able to afford it).
Streamline Your Claims Process With Pulpstream
Pulpstream’s end-to-end claims management solution offers all the above capabilities and more to fit all your claims processing needs. With Pulpstream, you can automate the entire claims process, from uploading and storing all relevant documentation (including evidence related to the claim and all your insurance policies) to communicating with stakeholders. Here’s how Pulpstream can make your claims process easier:
- The cloud-based platform is accessible via any device, anywhere, making it easy to track notes, attachments, emails, photos, videos, and even geolocation data.
- The sophisticated business intelligence and analytics tools can match the policy to the incident, meaning you don’t have to manually sift through your insurance policies to figure out which ones need to be claimed.
- The analytics functionalities can also analyze trends and visualize this data as graphs and tables to find patterns and identify gaps in your risk management.
- It can automatically generate reports to make your claims documentation easier and smoother.
- You can also track expenses related to the claim using the platform, and it will compile all the receipts with the other claims documents, ready to be sent to the insurance company.
- Finally, you can set it up so that all stakeholders including insurance providers are alerted to all claim-related updates in real-time. If the messages needing to be sent are unique and can’t be automated, the platform could send you a reminder to communicate so that crucial messages don’t get missed.
All this is available on a user-friendly dashboard that can be customized with little to no coding expertise. So what are you waiting for? Book a free demo with Pulpstream today and make your claims process easier!
