How Artificial Intelligence is the perfect technology to help insurers deal with natural disasters

Just a few days ago, Storm Eunice was the worst storm recorded in the United Kingdom in over 30 years. It paralysed the country, with gusts of wind up to 100 miles per hour causing significant damage to thousands of homes. 

Roads were cut off by falling trees, flights were cancelled, trains were left without power, and many hundreds of homes without electricity. Even the emblematic O2 Arena in London - affectionately known as “The Dome” - suffered significant damage, when large sections of the fabric panels making up the roof of the stadium were ripped to shreds.

Nor was Scotland spared from the storm, where Eunice dumped a huge amount of snow, forcing the closure of up to 150 schools. 

But the series of storms that northern Europe has been experiencing certainly did not end there. Just a few days later, it was Franklin’s turn, a storm carrying heavy rains. 

Indeed, once storms like these happened only every several years. Now, it appears they are happening several times a year. Something has changed and is continuing to change, and, in the insurance sector, we cannot be oblivious to it, nor ignore the effects of climate change. 

In order to respond in the best possible way, insurers are aware that technology is their best ally. Offering the care and attention that policyholders need at such times, conveying peace of mind and confidence, is key to offering the very best experience to customers.

Visual Intelligence as technology to meet the needs of policyholders in natural disasters

Visual Intelligence solutions make it possible to optimize the claims management processes of home insurers in times of high demand, such as those experienced by many people in the United Kingdom over recent days. So what benefits does this technology offer to insurers and policyholders?

Ability to respond quickly to policyholder claims 

The fact that the insuree has to contact the insurer, explain what the damage is, and provide all the relevant information is already complicated in itself. And it can be an incredibly worrying situation for the customer who has suffered the damage to their home. 

The traditional processes of first notification of loss, or “FNOL”, can take hours, even days on some occasions. This is because, after the first contact, the insurer has to analyse all the information provided on the damage, decide whether and which professional needs to go to the scene of the claim, re-contact the insuree, and so on. In short, it’s a process of comings and goings that prolongs the situation for days and days, and only increases the dissatisfaction and frustration of the insuree.

Thanks to Visual Intelligence solutions, insurers are now able to respond much more quickly to policyholders, speeding up the management process, and giving them a solution as fast as possible.

Facilitating the evidence gathering process

The traditional way of doing things was to always send an expert to the scene of the claim, to collect the necessary evidence and document the accident, with photos, videos, information on the insuree, etc. Today, thanks to Visual Intelligence solutions, companies can simply collect all the evidence they need from the mobile device of the insuree. 

Once the claim has been reported, the insurer sends the policyholder a text message with a link that will allow them to send all the necessary evidence and information via web-app, and so without the need to actually download any app.

This fully remote and self-guided evidence collection process makes it easier for the policyholder to provide all the information much more quickly, starting the claim process almost instantly. 

This is exactly how our Visual Intelligence solution for home claims management works. Using a conversational interface, we are able to request all the relevant information and photographic evidence of the damage from the policyholder, which our Visual Intelligence engine automatically processes, and uses to offer clear actionable inputs to the insurer.

Stop treating claims as work tasks that need to be solved, rather than difficulties that the policyholder is facing 

Damage to a home is a considerable problem for the policyholder, affecting their daily life, and that of the people they live with. Contrary to superficial damages to a car, only seen when using it, damage at home is constantly there, causing constant problems or discomfort to the occupants. 

For this reason, by starting to treat home claims as difficulties the policyholder is facing, rather than a mere work task, leads to a much higher degree of empathy, and improves trust between the insurer and the policyholder as a person, not just as a policy reference number. This allows for a much more personalized treatment, with the insurer’s processors focused on the person on the other side, and not on the mechanical tasks that technology can do much more efficiently. 

Bdeo’s Visual Intelligence solutions, designed and developed to solve the problems of both insurers and policyholders

Above, we talked about how Visual Intelligence technology is capable of optimizing company processes. Now, let’s talk more precisely about what Bdeo can offer to the home insurance sector.

Our Visual Intelligence for Claims solution can identify the cause of water damage, with extremely high precision. Using the remote and self-guided evidence collection process we mentioned above, the policyholder sends all the damage information to the web-app linked by text message, and, thanks to our Visual Intelligence engine, all this data, together with the reason for the damage, is passed instantly on to the insurer. 

This allows for the incident to be immediately assigned a degree of severity, allowing agents to prioritize which incidents to attend to first, and whether or not and which experts should be sent to the scene of the incident, saving unnecessary visits. 

This is how our solution for home claims works, one that revolutionizes the operations of insurers and finally puts the customer at the centre of the process, giving them a much faster solution in times of high demand, such as those recently experienced in the UK.