Property & Casualty (P & C) Breakout

ICAE breakout sessions provide for a free-form question-and-answer period, professionally moderated by both regulators and corporate professionals.  The result?  Best practices distilled for all to vet and approve.

For the P & C session, issues and challenge topics were proposed and voted upon.  The top vote-getters were taken to small groups for discussion (each group had at least one regulator to provide regulator insights).

Renee Campbell, Michigan Department of Insurance and Financial Services, and Marty Fisher, Martha Fisher & Associates, facilitate the Property & Casualty Breakout session.

The challenges from the group included:

• Internal Escalation for complaints (includes executive complaints)
• Consumer education
• Timeline for responses
• Social media
• Root cause data
• Self-reporting
• Technology VS relationships
• NAIC’s standard for federal regulations for privacy

The top five were taken to small group for full discussion.  Here’s how that looked…

Internal escalation for complaints

Defining points for the topic included that the company must capture…

• When complaint first occurred
• Where does complaint get escalated to and
• If the nature of complaint gets redefined as complaint escalates
• The challenge of push back for ownership of the resolution

Recommended best practices:

• Educate frontline people
• Understand that owner of complaint needs all information about the complaint
• Keep a list of hot topics going so that no matter where complaint originates, it gets tracked in the aggregate information and eliminates duplicate work
• Have a single-point coordinator for consistency
• Make sure complaints get to correct person—ensure consumers aren’t talking to incorrect people in the company
• Have systems talk to each other to make sure all touch points are informed AND to identify when the same complainant is reaching out through multiple channels
• Regardless of whom is complaining and/or who they find to listen, strive for consistency in response

Consumer Education
All recognized consumer education is valuable, but the question of which entity is responsible for consumer education: DOIs or companies?

Recommended best practices:

• Regulator podcasts for outreach
• Ensuring familiarity with the wealth of NAIC resources
• Company to provide agent training
• Company to provide customer walk-through, real-world scenarios for consumers to aid in product understanding
• Suggest health care’s summary of benefits as a model for better consumer understanding

Timelines for responses
Companies try to comply with state DOI timelines, but sometimes it’s just plain difficult when consumer affairs doesn’t know when the clock started ticking.

Recommended best practices:

• Go with drop dead response date to DOI
• Use common sense
• Be sensitive to issues
• People feel trust has been broken, respond to that emotion rather than deadlines

Social Media
Companies and regulators want to ensure the consumer has the social media outlet, but it’s not always clear when to own a message and when not to.  Then, once owned—what division within the company owns a complaint—communications that monitors social media or consumer affairs that owns the complaint process?

Recommended best practices:

• Create processes and procedures for who responds and how to socialize information within the company
• Turnaround time—one hour for contact
• Monitoring beyond business hours
• Encourage complaints to go offline for handling
• Recognize not a formal complaint until identity verified

Root-Cause Data
Root cause analysis can be a great strategy for providing superior customer service.  However, it can also be messy with false positives or negatives escaping scrutiny.  To best handle root cause analyses, companies should be able to define contributing factors, have a clear understanding of future actions, have a clear path to push data to management and have empowered front line people.

Recommended best practices:

• Spend the time to determine how to generate a baseline analysis
• Create closed-loop feedback mechanisms and audits
• Embed compliance team within different units

Time was up before the ideas stopped, guaranteeing another free-flow of ideas at the 2016 Exchange (see the Big Reveal).

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