Overview
On January 31st 2020, the World Health Organisation declared Covid-19 a global health emergency, with human-to-human transmission of the virus gaining pace. By February, global air travel had become restricted and, just a month later, the virus had officially been declared a pandemic; triggering a UK-wide lockdown. Cancellation claims on travel insurance policies began to soar.
 
Challenge
Between March and May 2020, the volume of travel cancellation claims received by Charles Taylor increased by 400%. But we were well served by our extensive experience of managing claims surges; not least those caused by recent tour operator collapses and the Australian bush fires. We also had cutting-edge technology that enabled us to forecast call volumes and allocate our 24/7 multilingual specialist staff accordingly. In addition, we had end-to-end automated processes in place for low value, high-volume claims.  However, Covid-19 cancellation claims were originating from multiple insurer clients; some of whom did not have Electronic Notification of Loss (ENOL) capabilities.
 
Solution
We collaborated with clients to shape a consistent and fair customer response to the claims surge. This included giving travel insurance customers the choice of automated claims solutions for low-value non-emergency claims, including ENOL for new cancellation claims. Meanwhile, we used our in-house technical expertise to create a fast-track ENOL Lite option for insurer clients who did not have ENOL capability.
 
Benefits
Tens of thousands of customers used the automated service; enabling us to accelerate their claims journeys, preserve settlement times and free-up our specialist claims staff to manage more complex claims.
By combining technology efficiencies with human skills and drawing on additional claims handling capacity we successfully met our clients’ service level agreements throughout the surge.