COVID-19 changed the world in more ways than one. It shut people inside, closed country borders and it closed down businesses.
Despite all this, many companies thought they were protected against the COVID-19 storm thanks to their business interruption insurance. Many private individuals also thought they were protected — through insurance policies like travel insurance or wedding insurance — preventing them from losing out financially after cancellations due to lockdowns and quarantines.
But plenty of these people have discovered a nasty truth: insurance companies have no intention of paying out.
Insurance providers are refusing — en masse — to provide payments. Despite calls of unethical, immoral and illegal treatment of their customers, the insurance industry is taking the stance of COVID-19 being an unforeseeable and unprecedented crisis for which their insurance policies were not designed to cover.
Consumers feel differently. They feel that insurers agree to financial support specifically for unexpected circumstances and therefore COVID-19 should be no different. So we enter a new conflict between insurers and customers, which brings claims management companies into the forefront.
The Role of Claims Management Companies in COVID-19 Claims
The COVID-19 crisis has presented a grey area for insurance companies and consumers. For some policies, there will be legitimate grounds for the insurer not to pay out; and for others, there will be legitimate grounds for the consumer to receive a full settlement.
While insurers are being urged by the Treasury to pay what’s owed, the encouragement is doing little to persuade many financial services from taking action.
Claims management companies (CMCs) are set to be the intermediaries in disputes between consumer and insurance providers. Through the service a CMC offers, consumers will look to force through a settlement they believe they are entitled to, but insurers are unwilling to pay.
Even for those insurers that are paying, the settlements have been found by businesses to be much too low. These low-ball offers lead them to claims management companies, hoping to acquire the correct level of compensation for their policy.
How to Prepare for Your Claims Management Company for COVID-19 Claims
Hundreds of thousands of businesses in the UK are affected by a lack of payouts. Many of these businesses will go out of business if left without settlements.
Claims management businesses are faced with an influx of COVID-19 claims, many of which stand to secure CMCs good returns thanks to substantial subsistence payouts. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is warning insurers that they are liable for claims, which means this isn’t wasted effort on behalf of CMCs.
There is money to be made.
But to benefit from the volume of cases soon to be made available to claims management companies, there must be systems in place to support such interest. If you can’t cope with volume, you’ll have to turn business away, and nobody wants that.
The best way to prepare your business for COVID-19 claims management success is to introduce claims management software. LogiClaim is a powerful tool that automates a number of important claims processes and provides consumers with a custom-built app to file details and submit evidence for claims.
How LogiClaim Can Help Your Claims Management Company
Our systems provide a range of utilities that support your claims management business, which you can read about in more detail here. If you’re looking for the quick version, however, the simple fact is that by incorporating our software, you can streamline your claims management processes.
With your current level of resources, you can manage more claims. You can get through more cases without having to hire more staff, because a lot of the administrative work of a claim — such as onboarding and communication follow-ups — is automated and taken care of by LogiClaim. Your team can instead focus on actually processing claims that are ready to go and achieving compensation payouts.
This is the ideal situation for handling the influx of COVID-19 compensation claims. Once the crisis is over, demand will inevitably die off. These are not like PPI claims where consumers could wait around and claim at their leisure. A lot of the COVID-19 claims are urgent and need quick and effective settlement to ensure companies don’t fail. Therefore, to increase business size to cope with demand, only to find you’re overstaffed as interest dies off, will mean unnecessary resource expenditure.
Claims management solutions from Logican can help you deal with the influx of new COVID-19 cases while protecting your company from over-investment.
Logican are industry-leading providers of business process management software. Get in touch with our team today to learn more about LogiClaim, or to find out how we can build your business bespoke software for unique challenges.
