Advanced technologies have ushered in a revolutionary class of software known as claims guidance, realising the potential envisioned for the next generation of claims software.
This innovation is transforming the landscape for income protection providers by enabling claims professionals to offer a truly personalised experience to claimants during challenging times in their lives.
Earlier this autumn, FT Adviser highlighted how income protection was being seen as a growing necessity, underscoring the critical role it plays in safeguarding individuals’ livelihoods.
This aligns seamlessly with the transformative promise of AI in income protection, which is rapidly becoming a reality, changing the art of the possible for providers by empowering claims professionals and in turn, delivering a truly personalised experience for claimants facing a difficult period of their life.
At a time when even the Department of Welfare has a shift of focus to a Department for Work as part of its Back to Work plan to support the 2.8mn people who are out of work due to disability or ill health.
By ‘personalised’ here, we mean equipping claims professionals with the tools and the time to show compassion to customers, enabling them to demonstrate more empathy and all the humane characteristics and skills needed to help claimants return to work at the earliest possible instance.
We are all operating in the new normal of an environment where customers’ expectations around ease of use, convenience and quality of interaction with their financial services providers have reached peak levels.
Even if they would not use the word themselves, personalisation is what they expect.
With AI augmenting their knowhow, claims professionals can deliver it.
This trend around expectation has developed at the same time as an increasing focus among the regulators to ensure all financial services providers are delivering healthy outcomes for customers and demonstrating how they performed their duty fairly.
Information overload
AI solutions will continue to be adopted by claims because the function is inherently difficult, requiring too much information for one person to manage by themselves.
Leveraging machine learning and natural language processing, AI-powered claims guidance analyses and interprets vast amounts of both unstructured data, such as handwritten notes, and structured medical information, such as test results.
This enables claims guidance to direct examiners to the right actions on the right claims at the right time, maximising the impact.
This can all be demonstrated to regulators as a clear audit trail of how AI is enabling firms to undertake a core duty of care for consumers.
A blend of touch points
We can see now that the rapid proliferation of AI-powered claims guidance, particularly in the US, is moving the income protection market into a new era of ‘hyper-personalisation,’ whereby providers can optimise bespoke customer journeys.
This can involve a blend of digital and human touch points, with AI-powered claims guidance enabling adjusters to give customers extra support, where needed, at the earliest point possible.
