Let’s Humanise Back Office Operations

Errors and delays in the back office are the #2 cause of customer dissatisfaction.

– The Business Value of a Next-Generation Back Office, Aberdeen Group, 2017

But organisations are still lagging in their efforts to modernise and extend their digital transformation efforts to the back office. I think part of the reason may be that they just can’t visualise the impact. So let me give you a real-life example.

Traditional Life Insurance Claim Experience

Imagine this. You’ve just lost a loved one. In addition to dealing with your grief and making funeral arrangements, you also need to deal with your insurance company. You call to inform them of your loved one’s death, and your wish to cash in on their life insurance policy. You need the money to help cover the funeral expenses. And that’s when the nightmare really begins.

You’ve dutifully paid your premiums for years. You expect your insurer to be just as considerate and prompt in processing your claim. But instead you are faced with multiple paper forms and repeated calls to authenticate your claim. It almost becomes a habit, a set weekly appointment in your calendar to call the insurer to check on the status of your insurance claim. And each and every time you have to go through multiple steps to verify you are who you say you are with the agent.

Finally, three months after your loved one departed, your bereavement benefits get paid.

Who needs this added stress at times like this? Where’s the empathy? Where’s their compassion?

Unfortunately, it’s lost in a myriad of fragmented processes, siloed data sets, and mounds and mounds of paper.

A Modernised Insurance Claims Experience

This was the case at a large life and pension funds manager. They had a negative 11 net promoter score (NPS). Let me repeat that: A NEGATIVE 11 NPS!

Enter in a new managing director who had used Verint Work Manager solution in other organisations for years. He immediately went about implementing the solution across both the front- and back-office operations, giving the insurer real-time data on the end-to-end customer journey.

The data from the solution gave them the proof points they needed to get executive management to invest in modernising the claims operations. For example, they now had proof that:

• Insurance claims were taking on average 35 days to process, with some claims taking as long as 85 or even 100 days.
• Customers were calling in repeatedly to check on claims status, costing the organisation thousands in agent time.

They immediately spotted two ways to improve efficiencies and speed of service. First was to eliminate paper claims. Period. Gone. With executive management backing, they were able to create an online tool for submitting insurance claims AND for verification of identify and claim validation.

Within 8 months they were able to transform their insurance claims operations. They gave front-office agents access to Work Manager, so they had end-to-end visibility into claims. They upskilled their front office agents so they could actually complete many of the claims requests right at the first point of contact. They changed an average 35-day turnaround to just three days—and in some cases just two hours!

Their NPS score went from -11 to +79 NPS in just 8 months!

Learn More about Modernising Your Back Office

Listen to Omer Minkara, VP and Principal Analyst at Aberdeen Group, describe the benefits of a modern back-office in this 45 second video. And, download the Aberdeen Report: Essentials to Modernize Your Back Office to learn the three building blocks of modern back-office operations.