Taking steps towards a customer-centric service.

Our Head of Quality Assurance, Richard Norbury, recently spoke to Modern Insurance Magazine about taking steps towards a customer-centric service.

What steps do you take to provide a customer-centric service to your customers?

"As Carpenters Group enter our 30^th year, we continue to be recognised by our Insurer partners for providing market leading customer services. We continuously find new ways to improve the customer experience across both the insurance and legal claims journeys.

Customer experience has always been, without exception, our primary focus. We continue to work collaboratively with our Insurer Clients to create bespoke, effective solutions for them and their policyholders and by doing so we continue to build long-term relationships within the insurance industry.

We understand that first class customer service is not only crucial to the customer following an accident, but our insurer partners rely on us to provide the level of service they’ve promised, during the “moment of truth”. When the accident happens we are there to protect their brand and their reputation.

There are a number of key elements to our approach that make us the first choice for Insurance and legal services:

• We put the customer at the centre of the process;
• We place a premium on compliance and ethics;
• We own and maintain market leading technology that provides us with scale and flexibility.
• We operate specialist teams for every type of case, from a simple excess recovery case to a complex, high-value, catastrophic injury claim.

Our team of Serious and Catastrophic injury lawyers continues to act for our most seriously injured customers.  With emphasis on early collaboration, immediate needs assessments, access to rehabilitation and interim payments to relieve financial stress - our lawyers are proactive from day one.  We understand the ripple effect on the wider family and look to support the family as a unit from the outset.  We work with medical and rehabilitation experts who are leaders in their field to ensure our customers are able to be the best version of themselves post-accident.

Technology and Innovation are at the heart of everything we do.  Our in-house team ensures we remain an agile and forward-thinking business, working as key digital partners with our insurer clients to improve customer journey.

All of our insurer and customer services are developed in house, including MyClaim which is a customer communication portal allowing our customers to access their claim via their laptop, smart phone or tablet and remain connected to their claim at all times. 

Over 60% of our customers use the MyClaim app to read letters and updates on their claim, upload receipts, and can use the portal to send and receive messages to and from their personal claims handler.

Our commitment to IT and digitisation has helped the Group navigate through the tough initial period of the OIC Portal and Carpenters remain at the front of the pack due to our early integration solution and ongoing system and process improvements which means that the customers we represent on the OIC portal, settle their claims quickly and easily.

Our industry leading claims resolution initiatives include collaborative Escalation processes whilst our Early Settlement Protocols (ESP) reduces insurer touch points and significantly reduces claim duration.

Our Resolver process replaces the court system in Stage 3 cases removing numerous costs from the process and reduces life cycle of the court process by 9 to 10 months, whilst delivering results for the customer.

So, for 2024 we are, as always, very much focused on our customers and our insurer partners. We will continue to look for new innovative ways to provide frictionless, swift and simple solutions to enhance and deliver our market-leading customer service."
Richard Norbury, Head of Quality Assurance
Carpenters Group

Credit: Modern Insurance Magazine