In series 1, we highlight the market need for a digital desk approach, the key drivers and challenges. Series 2 highlights the history of the digital desk from the early days of desk adjusting to today’s digital transformation.
Here is Series 1 – a quick rundown of Plnar’s Digital Desk Platform – you can’t enable a virtual claims strategy without it!
The market landscape for insurance continues to undergo major shifts and the speed of change is not slowing down. Largely due to rapid digital transformation, what was once thought of as a “Meet the Jetsons” fantasy, is now a reality. Augmented reality (AR) software is no longer relegated to expensive video game headsets—instead, we can use AR applications as a guide to simplify complex instructions and to improve workflows and processes. With advanced computer vision, we can train computers to see what our human eyes would see, capturing more nuance and context than ever before. These kinds of technology applications, and others, continue to change our behavior and expectations around information access and how easy certain tasks should be.
With the speed with which technology changes, many industries struggle to keep up. The insurance industry is historically conservative and slow to make sweeping changes, which has caused a serious lag in technology adoption. As non-traditional tech disrupters enter the insurance field, insurers absolutely need to take a careful, critical look at how they build relationships with their customers and whether or not their current user journeys, experiences and processes cultivate a high level of satisfaction. The claims process is burdened with changing consumer expectations and inefficiencies and insurers know there is significant room to transform the claims experience to boost profits, improve customer satisfaction and stay competitive.
Introducing the
Plnar Digital Desk Platform for Interior Property Claims—How Did We Get Here?
A quick history lesson: before desk adjusting, a field
adjuster was responsible for capturing data about properties and damage or
scope of loss while also completing the estimation. However, in 2009, the number of catastrophes
that resulted in insured property losses nearly doubled from 2008, resulting in
a 400% increase in the total value of property losses over a one year period.
That’s a huge jump! To deal with this drastic increase, providers shifted their
approach to allow most of the analysis and estimation to happen at the desk so
that documenting the damage could happen faster with less expensive resources. This shift
was essential for lowering operating costs and enabling providers to handle a
higher volume of claims.
While traditional desk adjustment was a useful response to trend over a decade ago, the digital age has popularized a new, virtual way of doing things. At plnar, we’ve discovered that a digital approach is needed if insurance companies want to stay competitive.
Self-Service and the Digital Desk Enables Virtual Interior Property Claims
Digital desk adjustment does not remove the human element of the claims process—rather, it enhances it. Instead of spending hours on the phone reviewing data points, re-answering standardized questions or tracking down information, desk adjusters and customers can build engaging, proactive relationships where both parties are informed, on the same page and ready to settle claims virtually and with ease.
The digital desk marries the move towards operational efficiency
of traditional desk adjustment with the virtual, automated and simple digital
experiences that today’s customers love. With a self-service capability
and fully digital desk, anyone, not just field adjusters, can capture interior
space and damage data and send the full context of the space to the desk
adjuster for analysis and estimation.
Data is digitized and processes are automated so that the desk adjuster
can spend more time on claim analysis, settlement and customer service instead
of data collection and validation. I am especially excited about this digital
approach because it gives considerable autonomy to customers while providing
clear, complete, measurable digital photos that puts the adjuster virtually in
the interior space. Not only does this approach drive a more efficient and
agile claims process, it also saves money and allows insurers to respond to
claims with flexible, scalable processes.
How Plnar’s Digital Desk Platform Enables Virtual Claims for Interior
Properties
We’ve developed a digital desk adjustment platform – powered by guided augmented reality, artificial intelligence and computer vision that allows companies to scale their claims management processes based on the simplicity or complexity of claims. For small interior property claims that do not require field adjusting services, our platform allows the policyholder, a gig worker or inspector to report damages and settle claims almost instantly by simply taking a picture of the interior room and and damage and uploading the digital photos into the plnar platform for analysis. This process enables adjusters to spend more time building customer relationships, answering questions and processing claims rather than focusing on time-consuming manual scoping and damage assessment that must be analyzed later. Just like I would rather spend my time bringing value to my clients rather than answering emails, our platform gives insurers more time to spend doing what they want to do—building great customer relationships.
I love what we are doing at plnar.
Check it out for yourself by visiting plnar.ai and watch Plnar in Action to see how we are transforming the interior virtual claims process today.
Since inception,
our vision for plnar has been centered on the very human elements of technology,
and how artificial intelligence and augmented reality can help us work smarter,
better and faster. We think we are pretty good at doing that, and a lot of
people seem to agree. Our original AR dimensioning app has been downloaded more
than 400,000 times since its launch in 2017 and has helped users complete thousands
of projects.
Two years can be eons in technology startup time, and we have never stopped learning and growing since we launched the app. We have talked to countless organizations across the insurance industry and realized there were significant challenges and gaps to implementing virtual claims that we were perfectly suited to solve. Additionally, we brought on insurance executive and industry strategist Andrew Robinson to our Board of Directors in March, and his expertise has been an invaluable asset to our deepened understanding of the insurance industry. The more we dove in, the more we realized that we could offer something powerful, unique and essential to insurance companies—the ability to completely digitize and provide the completed context of interior properties and damages – a key requirement needed to make their dreams of virtual claims a reality.
Virtual claims
are vital to the continued life and growth of insurance companies, especially
because so many technology disrupters have made huge gains in what was once a
conservative industry dominated by legacy leaders. Customers have more choice
than ever, and extreme generational differences in service options can make
insurers feel like it’s impossible to make everyone happy. Not to mention,
operating costs continue to skyrocket with no signs of slowing down.
This is where plnar comes in. Our research, deep learning, technology expertise and development and strong leadership have culminated in our digital desk platform for interior property claims that enables digital desk adjusting and the self-service experience that consumers expect. They say the best things in life come in threes, and our digital desk adjustment platform enables self-service claims with a digital smartphone, generates complete data sets, including interactive 3D models, and puts the desk adjuster virtually in interior spaces with digital desk tools. This three-step approach helps insurance companies digitize their adjustment processes to deliver fully virtual claims and delight customers across the board.
The “secret
sauce” to our digital desk platform is SmartPix, a first-of-its-kind
dimensioning and modeling technology. We have recently announced a new version of this technology that
puts desk adjusters virtually in interior spaces and allows the addition of
in-photo measurements and up-to-date 3D models without time-consuming,
expensive, back-and-forth exchanges with field resources. By enabling digital desk adjustment with
SmartPix, plnar allows adjusters to work faster by seeing the full context of
an interior without ever leaving their desk.
This renewed vision and reinvigorated focus on bringing truly virtual claims to interior properties by enabling a digital desk platform for insurance companies is a natural evolution of our mission. At plnar, we do not avoid change if all our data, insight and learning tells us that change is needed for true innovation. After all, Winston Churchill once asserted that “to improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.”
We are excited to
enable virtual claims for interior properties with our digital desk platform because
we know it is an essential step forward in making the insurance claims process
better for insurance companies and their customers alike. Our promise to our clients
(and Winston Churchill) is this—we will never stop pursuing perfection.
New version of SmartPix maximizes every pixel to drive down claims costs and close claims faster.
PLNAR is pleased to announce the release of an
enhanced version of PLNAR SmartPix™ (SmartPix), a first-of-its-kind technology
for property and casualty (P&C) insurance organizations which transforms
desk adjustment by enabling adjusters to easily add interior space measurements
and annotations to digital photos taken by policyholders, gig workers,
inspectors, or anyone with a smartphone.
As P&C insurers continue to invest in “breakthrough innovations” that speed claims settlement and reduce costs, PLNAR disrupts the traditional one-size-fits-all claims process by giving desk adjusters flexible options and tools for documenting and assessing property damage better based on claim type and complexity. This new version of PLNAR’s SmartPix patented technology puts desk adjusters virtually in the space and allows the addition of in-photo measurements and up-to-date 3D models of the interior space without time-consuming, expensive, back-and-forth exchanges with field resources.
“We love that SmartPix gives our desk adjusters the ability to measure in photo,” said Walter Leddy, CEO for IAS Claims Services. “It’s a powerful tool in helping us reduce the need for reinspections and allows us to resolve claims with more confidence.”
Through
this release of SmartPix, PLNAR enables true Digital Desk Adjusting (DDA),
which allows desk adjusters to settle interior claims more rapidly for
customers by capturing all data and context needed from digital photos sent
directly to the desktop or easily accessed from the cloud.
“DDA gives desk adjusters the
digital intelligence to see the full context of the interior property, and helps
insurers adjust and close claims faster,” said Andy Greff, CEO of PLNAR. “Using
SmartPix, desk adjusters can more quickly and efficiently determine the true
extent of interior property damage by automatically generating measurements or
updating a 3D model of the space to account for objects, such as windows or
doors, not originally included in the description of the damage.”
PLNAR’s technology integrates with desktop tools and claims
management systems to create seamless workflows that improve efficiency and
reduce costs. Anyone can now capture more data to create fully-realized 3D
models of interior rooms in minutes with PLNAR’s intuitive AI- and AR-powered
app and platform. The latest version of SmartPix is currently
available to existing PLNAR insurance customers, with new pilots launching on a
regular basis.
