Leadership Insights: growth and improvements in claims

Mark Colegate: Kelly Whittington is Commercial Lines Claims Director at Aviva. She joins me now. Well, Kelly, tell us a bit about the team and your role in it.

Kelly Whittington: Yeah, sure. So the claims team is quite a big team. We've got three call centres across the UK. We've got our team in Norwich who look after motor claims, our team in Perth looking after property claims. And then we've got our team in Glasgow looking after our casualty claims and then that's coupled with a number of home workers like our loss adjusters where we've got national coverage up and down the UK. And of course, we've then got all of our own body shops that sit across the UK as well as we've got 21 sites who are taking in vehicles to get them repaired to enable customers to get back on the road after an accident. So it's a really big team. And then my role as part of that is to look after our commercial motor and our commercial property teams and alongside that, I'm also responsible for looking after our claims service managers who spend their time out with clients and brokers seeking feedback about how we're showing up and what we can do to improve the service that we're offering day to day.

Mark Colegate: And what have been the main developments in this part of the business so far this year?

Kelly Whittington: Yeah, so it's been a busy time in claims, actually. We've been doing a lot of recruitment. The business across Aviva is growing, which is great news. But so far this year, it's seen us recruit nearly 700 roles and that's a mixture of replacing roles where people have left to new opportunities but also recruiting for the growth that we've seen. We've seen about 25% of those roles have been as a result of needing to - people who have gone on to get other opportunities within Aviva, which is great. But then we've also needed to grow the business to make sure that we're ready to deal with claims for the business growth that we've seen. As a result of that, we have had some service challenges in some of our areas and so we've been working really hard to get things back on track, and we're really pleased with the progress that we're making in that space. We have got a bit more work to do but there's certainly been a lot of work to get us to where we are today. And we've also been taking on board a lot of the feedback that we've been getting from our brokers about where else we can improve and so as a result of that we’ve had a few initiatives that we're really pleased with. We have launched a new commercial vehicle repair network, and that enables us to service commercial vehicles, get them repaired in our own network. That was some feedback that we'd heard loud and clear was causing problems and pain points for customers. And we've also been growing the capability of our team and investing in areas such as counter fraud. We've been investing in our commercial property operating model and growing more loss adjusters. So it's been a very, very busy time, but lots of exciting developments.

Mark Colegate: Anything on the automation front?

Kelly Whittington: So, yes, we've started to do some work on digital, not necessarily full automation as such. But what we have done is we've revised some of the where people can service themselves and through our claims portal. And so hopefully brokers have started to see that that's now available on our Fast Trade platform. That's a platform that's used every day, in the broker's offices, and that makes it a lot easier. And that has seen us see some improvements in the number of customers that are getting their updates and their management information about how claims are doing themselves through the self-serve portal. And there are some further enhancements coming to that portal as we look later into the year.

Mark Colegate: What are some of the trends that you're seeing in the broader economy in industry in the realm that are that are having an impact on claims right now?

Kelly Whittington: Yeah, I mean, it's something that we have to keep our eye on all of the time. I think, you know, through the Covid period, we saw a lot, from a claims inflation point of view and we're still seeing some impacts from that. Areas that are particularly on our mind around labour. We do see that there's a shortage of labour, across the market and that is therefore meaning that the cost of labour is going up. And that's probably the one thing that's still keeping us a little bit awake at night. But some of the things that we're trying to do to combat that is, investing in capability now. We are growing the amount of apprentices that we work with, we're growing the capability that we have in-house so that we can mitigate some of the risk. But undoubtedly, that is definitely something that is on our mind. And then you couple that with some of the other trends that we're seeing on things like the growth of the electric vehicles that are out there, and the repairing of those, that needs to be in the forefront of our minds. So if I could focus on electric vehicles, I think that is something that we are starting to see more and more. And actually, a lot of those repairs are very different in the way that we need to go about looking after or servicing those repairs. So one of the things that that we're doing is I mentioned earlier our 21 Solus sites. We continue to grow the number of sites that we have across the UK so that we've got more capacity and more capability protected for Aviva customers. And as part of that, we're also training all of our technicians so that they are able to deal with those electric repairs.

Mark Colegate: And what's the next set of deliverables for brokers and clients that you're going to be focusing on?

Kelly Whittington: So quite a lot of this year so far, we've spent, building quite a few foundations on things. So one of the things that we will be ready to launch more on a broader scale by the end of the year will be the integration of our systems into one of the key software houses that a number of our broker partners work with. We think that's going to be a great opportunity because what that will enable brokers to do is get more regular updates on claims. By the end of this year then we're hoping that we'll be in a position that many more brokers will be able to tap into that so that's certainly a focus area. We're also investing a lot in claims. So I talked about the recruitment that we've done alongside that recruitment we're also looking at how we use the technology that's available out there to help with getting quicker, more consistent good customer outcomes in terms of, for instance, how we value a total loss. If someone's involved in a motor accident - how we could quicken up the liability decisions? So we've been building a lot of those this year, and by the end of this year, we'll see all of those starting to embed into our teams. So what I'd hope that our brokers and our clients start to see is us making quicker decisions in a more consistent way and helping get claims settled quicker.

Mark Colegate: And are there any longer-term predictions you've got for just what's going to be going on in the claims space over the next few years?

Kelly Whittington: Well so I think linked now but also what could be coming over the next few years - underinsurance is really on our minds. That is a market-wide concern. And in some recent surveys that we have undertaken about three-quarters of our brokers are concerned that customers may not have adequate insurance. I think that's a real concern when it then comes to claim stage because of course, that's when we'll potentially sort of start to see that biting and reputationally for the industry I think it's really important that we work together to try and solve that. That's both in terms of the actual sums insured that people have got, around their business interruption, but also the indemnity period that qualifies. So I think that it's something we've started to see a little bit of showing up now but it's something that we want to try and mitigate showing up on a broader scale. So tapping into tools that we've built, such as our commercial intelligence tool, which enables people to get adequate insurance upfront, I think, is something we're trying to mitigate. We've also got the whole world of Gen AI, which is on our minds and I think from a claims perspective, we've had a number of experiments happening in that space really focused on internally how we make ourselves more efficient and this is about complementing that tech with the human aspect of the role. So we've been trialling things such as how we can summarise notes in a much more succinct way to save that whole 'Please bear with me while I'm on hold'. So we're experimenting with lots of things in that space, and I expect longer term, then we'll start to see some of those coming into fruition. So I think what we like to pride ourselves on in Aviva claims is that we want to hear the feedback. We want to then work on that together to try and improve that. So partnership is going to be key, and that will remain regardless. There are lots of opportunities for us to work more together. I’ve talked about the underinsurance and how we can do more in that space and that I think is a great initiative for us to go away with. I think the other thing I would say is that in the motor space, there's lots of opportunity to work together as well where we can get claims notified to us in a more timely fashion and actually just last week, we launched some videos that will hopefully help brokers with educating clients about the importance of that. We're going to run some claims events that happen across the UK through October. We'd love to see lots of people coming along to those to really explore where are there other opportunities for us to work better together. But for me, that's all about partnership. And so we need to keep that two-way dialogue going. Let's keep hearing where are we showing up well. Where can we improve? And then how do we solve those problems together? So I really look forward to taking forward some of those initiatives.

Mark Colegate: Kelly Whittington. Thank you.

Kelly Whittington: Thank you.