Adjusters will find new ways to capture details for auto and property claims in the wake of the COVID-19 distancing recommendations, that still allow them to provide timely service without increasing exposure risks. (Photo: Shutterstock)
With travel restrictions, social distancing and potential quarantine areas due to COVID-19, businesses and homeowners must consider how their insurance company would respond if a covered property damage claim would normally require an on-site inspection.
It's an important question to ask because bad weather is not easing up for the pandemic. Tornadoes and other severe weather events have already caused much loss of life and damage in states throughout the South, Midwest and East. Meanwhile, we must prepare for the Atlantic hurricane season, which experts predict will be above average.
Thankfully, innovative insurers now have an answer — virtual adjusting, also known as desktop adjusting. By taking advantage of recent improvements in technology, virtual adjusting has reduced the need for field adjusters and vendor partners to travel to damaged sites. Instead, insurers can rapidly deliver the help customers need by assessing the damage virtually from their desktop.
Besides coming into maturity just in time for COVID-19, this technology is improving claims service overall through faster processing. Compared to the time it takes from claim assignment to estimate completion for traditionally inspected claims, virtually inspected claims can be more than twice as fast. It gets the check into the customer's hands quicker. It eliminates the hassle of agreeing on an inspection time, and it gives the customer an enhanced sense of control.
|Seeing a claim virtually
In QBE's case, experimenting with virtual adjusting began in 2017. That was the year Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria severely tested the insurance industry's field adjuster capacity. By leveraging its robust vendor relationships and reaching out to innovative technology startups, QBE first applied virtual adjusting to high-frequency/low-severity losses.
The new technology at that time involved specialized smartphone apps that allowed a claims professional to remotely direct the customer in real-time through a FaceTime-like app to inspect and document the damaged areas of the property as the basis for an estimate. Later, QBE added other high-tech tools. For example, one app helps guide the customer through photographing exterior damage to a building from different angles. Then, the app stitches the pictures together using an algorithm to generate an accurate 3-D model of the building. The model includes detailed measurements such as roofing information on slopes and pitches.
Thanks to these improvements, the repair estimating process has continued to accelerate. Moreover, the range of virtually adjusted claims has expanded to higher severity, more complex losses such as hail, roof damage claims and more complex wind losses. QBE has used virtual adjusting on covered claims as high as $100,000. Since COVID-19 travel restrictions went into effect, QBE has been virtually adjusting claims such as significant damage from pipe leaks and wind damage to the exterior of buildings.
In one case, a customer's building exterior suffered damage due to a severe storm. When the customer reported the claim, we sent instructions the same day on how to self-inspect the damage using the specialized 3-D modeling app. The next day, the customer finished the inspection and told us how easy it was. If we had sent an independent vendor to the building, the inspection could have taken a week to complete. The virtual process was faster, and the customer avoided the hassle of agreeing to an inspection time. Furthermore, the customer did not have to worry about the COVID-19 risk of someone visiting their property.
Virtual adjusting has indeed matured just in time for the COVID-19 crisis.
Eric Sanders is head of claims for QBE North America and is responsible for driving the experience of excellence for customers by deepening integration and improving performance across the company's claims operations supporting QBE's alternative markets and specialty & commercial businesses.
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