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Posted By kevinbti on 11 Feb 2013 08:05 PM
  I work with an insurance company and have been asked to revamp our storm team ops  What suggestions do you have to make the  teams most efficent?  I think a requirement of 60 claim inspection for every 12 days worked is a fair requirement  What do you think?  What requirements would you have in place?   What would you like to have in place for first team responders ettc; Thanks for any suggestions.

If they are IA's, I hold my team to a standard of 4 inspections & reports per day, with the goal of 6 & 6. Several of my guys can manage the 6 & 6, but they burn out within a month or so if they keep that pace up without breaks. 4 & 4 tends to allow them to knock off around 7 or 8pm, leaving them reasonably well rested for the following day. If you are just talking inspections/scopes and no reporting, 60 per 12 is a good number. If you expect them to do a consistent 5 inspections & 5 reports per day, you will probably encounter more than a few who cannot keep up the pace, unless you have very limited reporting requirements.

The biggest factor that I have observed with regards to handling heavy volume is internal support. If the carrier or the IA firm has the infrastructure and the ability to modify reports during the review process (just the little things.. verbiage, spelling, single line items, etc.) rather than kicking the reports back to the FA for minor corrections, heavy volume can be handled by the FA's with ease. If, however,  a FA returns from the field ready to prepare that day's reports and has to make a half dozen minor changes to the prior day's reports, the time consumed doing so is lost, as is the productivity that could have occurred during that time. Some FA's learn quickly from these occurrences and quickly adopt and apply the hard learned lesson to all subsequent reports; many, however, do not.

With daily claims, rejecting a file for minor changes is a standard practice, and such rejections can be used to hone the FA's skills and understanding of reporting requirements. This works out well, because a daily adjuster will tend to work with you for more than the duration of a catastrophe, and you have an adequate amount of time to train them to meet whatever standards apply. Unfortunately, when a catastrophe occurs, it generally becomes an "all hands on deck" or "warm body" situation, in which there is little time to properly shape the FA's reporting techniques.

The best advice I can offer is to reach out to IA firms in advance, and detail to them the specific needs of the carrier. Ensure that they have an internal staff of examiners appropriate to the number of adjusters that they offer to deploy. Ensure that the reporting format and requirements are absolutely clear. Ensure that you have at least a couple of backup IA firms in place in case the primary drops the ball.

Disclaimer: The number of inspections and reports that I have mentioned really would only apply to a typical event in an urban area, non-commercial. Commercial claims can take a lot longer.

Posted By ChuckDeaton on 13 Feb 2013 01:58 PM
Dear Administrator Fugate:

.....
Sincerely,



Sen. Charles E. Schumer

While that was certainly an interesting letter, what does it have to do with this thread? I think it deserves it's own :)

I believe the story speaks to response time by IA vendors and their employees

Posted By kevinbti on 11 Feb 2013 08:05 PM
  I work with an insurance company and have been asked to revamp our storm team ops  What suggestions do you have to make the  teams most efficent?  I think a requirement of 60 claim inspection for every 12 days worked is a fair requirement  What do you think?  What requirements would you have in place?   What would you like to have in place for first team responders ettc; Thanks for any suggestions.

.....................................................

Kevin,

if you were in fact tasked with revamping a carrier's response, it would seem that you would have some idea as where to start and what process to impliment (sans an arbitrary post on a public site) You have the wherewithall to come up with an idea that 5 a day seems viable. How did you come up with that number?

What's the best way to make your CAT work more efficient? Simply enough is to put forth a comprehensive estimate the very first time to bring your insured to a pre-event condition on all covered losses.

Jut my opinion and others will certainly vary, when you are putting a target number per day or every 12 days, you are starting from the wrong outlook immediately. Not withstanding experienced hands who know what they can do, yet even those experienced hands are doing themselves and the insured a disservice by either promises or asking from their subordinates a specific number of claims per day. OK, this is easier when we have certain losses (IE..hail) but during a large scale event, nobody can say with any certainty what they will encounter.

My personal experience in this industry is almost exclusively in the CAT area. Knocking out 4/5/6 a day means absolutely NOTHING if half of them are reopened later. The lion's share of my experience within the CAT realm is on PA rep'd and litigated claims. It is easy to see on these claims where the initial adjuster's mindset was focused upon.....and in far too many instances you can plainly see said adjuster was focused upon quantity of claims as opposed to quality of claims.

So to enhance a carrier's efficiency, don't start by giving adjusters a quota, when you do that, you are taking an adjuster's strengths and throwing them out the window, that from the onset negates an experienced adjuster into just another body.

Put the right people on the job and let them do their job, numbers be damned. In the end, it would probably surprise you how the numbers would even out between those who did 5 or 6 a day every day as opposed to those who did maybe 2 or 3 a day yet they got it right the first time.  

I agree with Chuck. If the job is done correctly, two a day may be a lofty goal. And even then account must be taken for the fact that the work flow is not such that two claims can be closed every day from the beginning of the storm.  This assumes that the work flow is even. This may be true on a Ford production line, but not when dealing with people. A production line model is not appropriate. Some days more are closed, and some days less. I think the most I closed in a day was eight, but most days the count was closer to three, and again this is after the inspection and scope had already been done on a previous day.

In 1995 I was working on staff for a major carrier and was sent to Fort Worth to handle a large hail storm. The carrier was in the process of revamping their catastrophe operation is a big way. Among the changes being considered was whether more claims could be handled by phone using preferred vendors to effect repairs. There were about 100,000 open claims submitted to the carrier for whom I was working. They funneled most of these to the approximately 1000 adjusters they brought in.

They also held 200 of these claims back and chose three of us to operate by phone as a test. The three of us spent two weeks calling these 200 insureds, trying to reach these 200 people and convince them to use one of three vendors to inspect and repair their roof (and any other hail damage). It was boring work stuck at a folding table twelve hours a day with nothing but three phones and a pile of files, and very frustrating as we called the same people over and over until we actually spoke to them in person. We did our best to talk them into having their claims in the manner we were suggesting. After two weeks we were called in to discuss how the trial had gone. We explained to the cat director that ultimately we had convinced FOUR (count 'em 4) of the 200 to forego inspection by an adjuster and use one of the preferred vendors. We explained that people didn't believe we were from the carrier because this was not the way their previous claims had been handled. Many more preferred to actually have an adjuster they could discuss their claim with. In our opinion the trial was a miserable failure. We then split the other 196 claims between the three of us and went out to inspect them in person. Within three weeks we had inspected, reported, and paid all the claims remaining.