Claims Satisfaction Leaders Reveal Secrets to Success

December 6, 2024 by

What is the secret to an insurance claims experience that satisfies customers?

For years, J.D. Power has conducted surveys and curated lists recognizing insurers that succeed at providing satisfactory claims experiences. Carrier Management recently asked claims leaders at two of the consistently higher-performing insurers to peel back the curtain and share what they’ve found works.

[executive_summary] Erie Insurance searches for employees who share the company’s commitment to service first, knowing the insurer can train for the technical aspects of claims handling. According to Cody Cook, VP of Claims, that’s part of the secret sauce that puts his company near the top of customer satisfaction ranking for claims handling year in and year out. Agency task forces are another key ingredient. [/executive_summary]

Training Center, Task Forces Bolster Erie’s Commitment to Service

At Erie Insurance, Cody Cook brings an actuarial background to his work in claims. Cook is the insurer’s senior vice president of claims—a role he began in 2020 after experience as an actuary led him to a decade-long leadership role in personal lines.

Erie works with 14,000 independent agents at about 2,300 agencies across 12 states and Washington, D.C. This year, the company hit 7 million policies in force. The insurer consistently ranks highly on both the J.D. Power property and auto insurance claims satisfaction studies. The company notched the third highest score on the property claims list in 2024, for example, and second on the auto list in 2023. (The 2024 auto numbers had not been published as of press time.)

Cook believes Erie has built its reputation as a company with a successful claims experience is tied to “how much Erie Insurance prioritizes it—and prioritizes it much beyond just the claims division.” This includes partnering with service-minded independent agents and creating coverage for policyholders.

Erie searches for employees who share the company’s commitment to service first, knowing the insurer can train for the technical aspects of claims handling.

“We really look for people that are good at service,” Cook explained. “Sometimes not even in the insurance application, but often times, we interact with service-minded people throughout their interactions outside of the company, and we’ll recruit those kinds of people, and we attract those kinds of people.”

He also pointed to his company’s investment in development. Erie has a 52,000-square-foot technical learning center used to teach employees both the technical aspects of claims handling as well as “the expectation that we have, the empathy that we expect” and the culture that Erie fosters.

That technical learning center is a hands-on claims training facility that features 14 vehicle bays, a three-story model home made from 400 different building materials, and other training aids, Cook said. The 52,000-square-foot claims training space serves as an interactive classroom for employees and agents to get an up-close look at property damage sustained to vehicles, homes and businesses.

Cook believes this service-minded approach extends beyond Erie’s employees and to the independent agents who work with the insurer. Erie attracts agents that value and prioritize service, Cook explained, “so it’s not just the employees that are providing good service, it’s our independent agents as well.”

Internal data shows where “there’s friction in the process,” Cook said, enabling the insurer to identify needs. For example, data was used to improve Erie’s democratization of information and sharing of status updates with policyholders.

“We’ve recently made some pretty significant investments in being able to provide status through the mobile app and our online account,” Cook explained. “So, seamlessly, as the adjuster is handling the claim, information is being provided through that portal, so that the customer—not when we’re available but whenever they want the information—they can go get that information.”

Regularly surveying customers points Erie toward opportunities for improvement. These surveys have high response rates, Cook explained, and Erie studies its customer “claims journey” to identify the emotions of customers throughout each stage.

“And obviously, where they’re strained or stressed, those are the places that we want to invest [in] and try to make things easier,” Cook said.

Erie also utilizes five “agency task forces.” Through these, the insurer works with independent agent representatives at each of Erie’s 18 branches that focus on various components of our business, Cook said, explaining that these agents can be envisioned as “mini focus groups.”

They interact with thousands of customers and “bring a real gold mine of information to us and help us prioritize our investments,” Cook said. Agents generally serve a three-year term and bring their expertise as an independent agent and a regional perspective to the task force meetings.

“We discuss opportunities within each area to collectively improve Erie’s value proposition for customers and agents,” Cook said in follow-up correspondence. “What our agents say sets Erie apart is that we listen and use their feedback and input to introduce and improve our products and service and enhance the agent experience.”

In addition to ranking highly on customer claims satisfaction, Cook said Erie is an industry leader in policyholder retention, “and I think that’s because when you think about our mission statement, it’s a value-based statement,” he added. “We’re going to provide the best protection [and] the best service possible and do that at the lowest possible cost. So, customers see that, and they appreciate the value.”

At Amica, Transparency Is Key

Amica Mutual Insurance ranked highest in overall auto claims customer satisfaction in J.D. Power’s studies in both 2022 and 2023. The Lincoln, R.I.-based insurer also notched first place in J.D. Power’s 2024 property claims study.

In typed responses to emailed questions, company leadership said that Amica provides “a claims experience that’s both efficient and empathetic, helping customers feel supported during a stressful time,” adding that representatives provide 24/7 claims support.

“Labor and material shortages for home and auto repairs have resulted in longer claim cycle times, which impacts when customers are made whole again,” said Karen Chiappinelli, assistant vice president, claims executive department, Amica. “We find that being transparent about this up front with our customers—and clearly communicating expectations—builds trust and reduces anxiety.”

J.D. Power: Consistent Top-Rankers ‘Consistently Deliver’

Mark Garrett, director of insurance intelligence at J.D. Power, said that insurers who regularly rank near the top J.D. Power’s auto lists “consistently deliver on all the top drivers of satisfaction.”

He added: “Additionally, these brands view their service experiences and the way they treat their policyholders as differentiators and focus on hiring/training to these skill sets. In fact, they typically have some of their largest advantages over competitors on ratings for showing empathy, concern and reps being helpful in addition to having the highest scores for fairness.”

Garrett explained that the overall index model (the drivers of satisfaction) has also been tweaked over the years, and a new format was used to synthesize the 2024 numbers. When the auto study debuted in 2007, it was built around the people in the process (local agents, adjusters, estimators) but has since expanded some of the interactions into an overarching “claim servicing factor” that address communication and interactions throughout the claim, Garrett said.

J.D. Power has also added a separate section around the appraisal/inspection process. Garrett shared that the company “substantially changed” its approach this year, as the company has “overhauled our survey approach and standardized many of the satisfaction drivers across journey-related experiences.”

More information about J.D. Power’s 2024 property claims satisfaction study can be found on the J.D. Power website.

Parting Thought: Tech and Human Touch

Cook believes opportunities to enhance communication with customers will be constant in the claims processing space. Erie will always invest in “meeting the customer’s need when it comes to communication [and] information sharing,” he said. The company will also continue to approach technology to improve human touch.

Erie has invested in eliminating what Cook called “manual work,” for example, because “it makes our capacity, our availability for meeting the customer’s need, for providing that human touch, it just gives us more capacity to do so,” Cook explained. “So, that’s really how we think about it. It’s not so much just a cost play or an efficiency play. It’s what can technology do to allow us to increase human touch?”

Claims was the focus of Carrier Management’s final print issue, including articles on social inflation, litigation funding, Generative AI, the future of auto insurance and more.

Those articles are featured in CM’s fourth-quarter magazine, “Unite and Conquer: Industry Battles Social Inflation.” (Download a PDF for free access to all articles in the magazine or become a Carrier Management member to unlock every feature article we publish.)

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