When is a claim not a claim?

Insurance is the most popular financial services product to be bought online.

The rise of the aggregators has pushed even more sales through this channel. As brokers and insurers embrace the web and spend vast sums of money on their internet strategies there is another side to consider: customer disputes.

Customers may question the price or the terms of the policy after purchase. They may also question the information held on your system at the time of a claim. How do you really know whether their complaint is based on application issues, simple confusion, or deliberate non-disclosure?

In the US, we saw an example of a customer adjusting their details until they got a price that they liked. They then submitted a claim. In this case the insurer, who was able to replay the whole session, threw out the claim.

“How do you really know whether their complaint is based on application issues, simple confusion, or deliberate non-disclosure?

The trick is not to try and solve the problem, but concentrate instead on solving the cause. In the world of insurance, when an online customer issue grows into a formal dispute, without documented "proof", it is only your word against theirs.

In your call centre, retrieving telephone conversations from your voice recording system is commonplace to improve customer service, monitor sales campaigns, or protect against difficult or fraudulent customer claims. Why is it not the same in your web channel?

Tim Gregory is vice president of Insurance at CGI Europe

CGI and Tealeaf has come up with a product, called Tealeaf CX (on display at at Biba), which preserves a complet record of all customer online interactions. It also offers a flexible way to retrieve and replay complete customer sessions - showing exactly what customers viewed in their web browser and the specific actions they took on each page.