First Notice of Loss Service Means Giving Catastrophe Survivors Calm, Caring and Competent Claims Experience
With low phone battery, no electricity, and belongings in ruin, thousands of Americans every year must spring quickly to rescue themselves while experiencing the traumatic event of surviving a natural disaster. The background of every First Notice of Loss call that comes in shares someone’s nightmare. Whether broken levees or cyclonic winds bulldozing through town, those affected are left with a heartbreaking scene of what home used to be. Dodging shards of shattered window while identifying saturated belongings— looking for anything to salvage— survivors find themselves as sudden insurance claimants who must start a new normal in recovering from their material and health injuries. In between settling the ruin of childhood pictures, family heirlooms, and momentos, we at Call Center Sales Pro hear their cries.
Insurance company executives know that no check is large enough to cover this kind of loss, and assigning the appropriate professional to the occasion is critical to the business practice. As leading with kindness can set every type of call up for success, the First Notice of Loss process asks uniquely more from agents than typical calls fielded, even for some medical clientele. Trained to operate efficiently respectful of limited time for FNOL callers, our agents allow policy holders the pace and assistance required on a claims processing call to navigate through confusion and at times anger that is difficult to express, or even all that can be expressed. Most callers in this scenario are not in the mental space to recall that having a readily available policy number at the time of calling is the best way to reach a clear result early in the call, and most are not fully up to speed on the terms of what kind of coverage is available to them.
A calming voice is sacrosaint in these moments, and the right professional FNOL call agent can navigate to an accurate claims submission.
Every summer through autumn are those months of the year when insurers brace for up to 10 billion dollars in claims from an average of 100,000 customers. After the storms comes the deluge of ringing phones. Agents like ours working for Call Center Sales Pro serve in partnership with insurance carriers to speak with policy holders for the first time as they report what’s lost, destroyed, and maybe gone forever.
In the telephone answering service and call center industry, this is called “CAT” season, and we watch the forecast alongside our clients, ramping up to put more than 100 people to work to care for the calls from countless victims of financial and medical wounds. Ordinarily with as little as three days notice (or sometimes less), Call Center Sales Pro brings our team to the ready with customized instructions. We power on through the crisis with evolving priorities through continuous check-ins with our insurance company clients.
We learned the ropes early on. During Hurricane Katrina, our teams managed up to 4000 calls a day from displaced, homeless and many then jobless persons- survivors who lost loved ones and experienced the trauma of civic disorder in the chaotic powerless days beyond the flood. We intrinsically feel that contracting for First Notice of Loss service is part crisis intervention and disaster relief, long before that of a business transaction.
When searching for the best company to act as first point of contact with the people who hold their policies, (the investors in the company), a salient business perspective to apply is in the recognition that a mishandled FNOL call can cost up to twenty five percent of callers from the business. As insurance companies vie to hold customers for a lifetime of coverage, assuring them of their entitlements is appropriate as well as fundamentally ethical. Doing so with compassion is better, and worth the premium in spades when the best call center partner is the first voice of your brand your policy holders will encounter.
Compassionate agents who can correctly process information is the first test of a worthy call center partner. Yet we know that strength needs to scale. What happens when a call center equipped with a hundred agents working for hundreds of clients are suddenly pivoting to triage the thousands of inbound calls coming from just one client, the insurance carrier?
Call centers can market to insurance companies, but only do so responsibly when “all hands on deck” means not only all administrative staff are on-call to support a peak in call volume, but also that a satellite network of call center partners is trained and at the ready for activation at a moment’s notice.
Fortunately for our insurance company clients, this is exactly our setup. We have been ready for the worst before, remain on deck for today, and are expeditiously preparing for even wider coverage into the future. Our most recent call processing system upgrades enable agents from limitless remote locations to log-on to join the support force handling the unique crisis of the day.
Insurance companies are additionally recommended to vet the redundancy and back up procedures offered by any prospective call center FNOL provider. Because floods, tornadoes, power outages, downed phone cables and road closures happen anywhere, it is an art and a science to ensure that the call center’s business stays open for your customers when they reside in the path of the storm. This is a point of excellence where the investments in a call center separate the experts from the amateurs. A good test to evaluate if a potential call center partner is capable of servicing your calls in any condition is by asking how their operations managers handle the crisis when their own teams are snowed in? When homeowners and businesses are boarding up and barricading in, we get to work with failsafe procedures.
Speaking the language of insurance in easily understandable terms for the caller is another important element of best-in-class FNOL programs. In developing the custom call script for a coming catastrophe, a properly scripted call intake procedure saves both money and sanity for all parties. How agents collect information for a claim is a basic task, yet our championship QA belts shine when our insurance company clients rely on our learning and development team at the call center to guarantee that agents are comfortable and experienced logging into the proprietary or industry-specific portal or CRM at our insurance carrier to guarantee accurate data is saved on both sides.
The recording of all claims calls is a mandatory component for insurance carriers as claims processing involves minutiae of detail that adjusters will often need to personally review. By soliciting the services of a premier call center partner, insurers tap into the technology of call logs and voice loggers that upload directly into the client’s system of choice.
Even when events are not mass casualty incidents and just involve one policy holder, it is sage corporate behavior to respect the needs of the individual consumer. For example, allowing a policyholder to leave a voicemail rather than speaking to someone during a tragic situation is an emotionally intelligent option to offer. At Call Center Sales Pro, we can setup specialized lines to allow callers to communicate with the privacy they desire and the convenience of speaking to a live processor when it is on their terms. We will make the follow up call or process what information can be made available to us for follow up by your representative. However we handle the calls are through a custom process we co-design with clients as the call center partner.
Remember that the tone of voice, the number of rings, and the ease of communication matter more to someone using your product than buying it for the first time. After a fender bender, the insurer is just one of many calls to make… for a tow, a loved one, and sometimes medical assistance. Our First Notice of Loss services are designed to support policyholders in stressful and time-sensitive situations. We treat callers with calm and care while collecting the details insurers need with clarity and accuracy.
We know this call can count for more than a quarter of a customer’s satisfaction. We help policy holders understand that they can use and keep their coverage, while the insurance company trusts us to keep their business.
Hiring a friendly voice and advocate for when your customers need it most is the choice that helps make peoples lives easier, reflecting the corporate values we celebrate sharing with each of our clients.