Breaking The Fourth Wall in Customer Service
If you have been in a car crash and its not your fault, you may be able to get a hire car from the at fault drivers insurance company while yours is being repaired, if the at fault driver is insured and their insurance company are accepting liability.
I was a claims handler for 9 years at a major credit hire company, generally what happens, is that when you get in contact with a credit hire company they will take you through about a 10 – 15 minute application over the phone, it’s a pretty lengthy phone call, but, it gathers up all the information about the accident and at fault driver so that they can see if they can recover on the costs of the hire car if they provide it to you right?
Now if you don’t know, when you work in a claims handler role, or even like most customer service roles, you generally always have to put on the “customer service voice” or “help customer mode” which invariably means you are going to try and “follow up on everything” and “do the best to achieve a positive result for all stakeholders” and so on and so forth,
you get it, we all have jobs right?
Psychology & Claims Handling
The Reasons Between Reasons
So like if you called me, and it was a disputed merging incident, even as we would be discussing that, which would be about, maybe, 6 – 8 minutes into the conversation, I wouldn’t be able to let you know, probability of providing you with the hire car is low, so you might wish to explore other options, no, I would go into “follow up on everything mode” exploring all processes, trying to work towards a resolution for you, and, I would probably give you positive corporate customer service language, and keep you updated, but, probably call and advise im unable to provide a hire car in 2 or 3 days, because of some arbitrary issue I knew was most likely going to be a problem very early into our first conversation.
Wish I could have just told you that straight away, but, I wouldn’t be able to, you cant when you’re a claims handler.
Now the reasons for this, is that the credit hire company genuinely wants to help you right, but of course their a business so they need to make sure that they can of course make the money back on the hire car if they provide it to you, with this in mind, it creates a challenging “up front” scenario right because there are hundreds of variables that can sometimes come into play when it comes to insurance lodgement, liability, evidence, legal nuances, all that sort of stuff, hence, why the claims handler has a job right? They explore these options investigate the claim and usually, in most cases, are able to provide you with a hire car, however, there are a whole bunch of times where that doesn’t happen, and as the claims handler, if you have been doing it for a while, you know, pretty early on, what probably is going to pan out, and what probably won’t.
Streamlining Matters to Increase Efficiency
So one day I was thinking about this problem, and how I might solve it, because, personally, I don’t like having my time wasted and im sure others don’t either, and without going into any details, this kind of scenario causes a whole host of issues for credit hire companies internal monitoring and key performance indicators as well, trust me, so they don’t like it either, but I digress, I try to solve the problem.
And basically, I consider, that in the 9 years of me being a claims handler, if I took what most insurers would consider fairly “simple” motor vehicle accidents, so far as liability, and then just asked a few questions up front to see if there were any obvious red flags, I could save everyone involved time, consumer and business by not proceeding with an elongated telephone process if, it was unlikely to conclude.
Now you would think as a consumer, then me, as an employee of a major credit hire company could then just put this in a suggestion box, and then surely, they could just do this? Well … no, because, again, people that work in call centres, at insurance companies, credit hire companies, or similar all have as part of their key performance indicators a quality assurance metric, on their calls, now the calls get audited, but it is as a random sample, by their managers, because obviously they take thousands of calls a month its not possible to listen to every one, as a result, claim department managers generally set in place a static set of questions, that a supervisor or manager will score, against the employee, and if its successful, they will grade those random samples as to how all your calls were across the month, If, you don’t ask certain questions, or don’t follow certain verbal process so far as the call is concerned, you will be marked down, and or failed,
Behaviours & Processes of Client Services
If all of that makes your head spin, in plain terms, you went to work, and didn’t do what your boss asked you to do today, that feels bad huh? Right, so for that reason, you cant just ask these red flag questions up front, doesn’t work that way, not because it cant be done, but because a claims manager would then have to employ dozens and dozens of supervisors, to individually monitor every single call, for individual quality assurance and it would need to be some ridiculous situation where you had a 1:1 ratio of supervisor to claims handler to monitor it.
Thus, QA Doesn’t work that way, and because QA doesn’t work that way, you can find yourself in a situation, where at 10 minutes into a claims lodgement process on the telephone, you are told you are unable to get a hire car, for what could have potentially been told to you 2 minutes into the conversation had the correct questions been asked.
In a practical sense, because of the number of variables associated with a car crash, when you try and condense that list to a fairly rudimentary list of motor vehicle accident types, you are not left with a whole lot, however, in those instances, there are simple questions you can ask very quickly to see if the claim probably will or wont proceed, so that’s great, I could just ask those questions to people right?
Automation of Basic Conversation Through Analysis of Conversational Behavior & Artificial Intelligence
Myself I have always had a interest in automation, macro style automation, and I noted that in following the process of reducing all known common motor vehicle accident claim arch types, to simplified arch types so as to be conducive to gating questions it resulted in the flow chart of dialogue, being quite simple, and formulaic, and being familiar with AI chat bots, considered, that so long as the underlying codebase was capable of interpreting basic legal liabilities, and simultaneously be able to interpret the way a wide range of people would input text, it should be possible to achieve a near approximation experience similar, to that which would be the determination of a claims handler with significant experience, and it turns out.
It can be done, fairly easily, and carhire.claims now exists in its present form, all be it, always under ongoing development.
Now this is not to say that you would be unable to obtain a hire car for scenarios that fall outside the scope of what is considered worth proceeding with, or not, no far from it, you very well may be eligible for the hire vehicle, but the platform exists so that individuals such as yourself, involved in a not at fault motor vehicle accident can have the option, of a streamlined process in instances for which liability is clear, and a not at fault hire car can most likely, on the historical burden of probability, based on case law data and arch typal scenarios know to be formulaic in insurance.
Empowering People with Tools to Save Them Time
So if, for example you were involved in a changing lanes accident, the AI would advise you, the same as a claims handler would advise you, that a dashcam or independent witness would usually be required in order to proceed, the difference is, the AI is going to tell you that fairly quickly, the claims handler, due to internal organizational factors, external to yourself, will proceed with the remainder of the matter, and, potentially may result in back and forth, un progressing results that ultimately lead to being advised you would be unable to be provided with a hire car.
You can of course still approach a credit hire company directly to discuss your particularly nuances, and I would strongly encourage you to do so if it was that your claim was unable to be submitted at carhire.claims, however, within a few seconds, you can quickly check your eligibility for a variety of simple motor vehicle accident types and if it can proceed, in theory, it should have an extremely high probability of it being accepted and your not at fault hire vehicle delivered when and where you need it by your nominated credit hire provider of choice.
