Rosgosstrakh Achieves World-Class Claims Handling
At Rosgosstrakh (RGS), customer service excellence equals uncompromising claims settlement standards for its customers across Russia.
The RGS Challenge
For RGS, Russia's largest universal insurance company and market leading non-life insurer, the challenge to standardize claims handling and improve customer service was a formidable one. Not only does their service territory span the 6.5 million square miles (17.1 million square kilometers) and 11 time zones of the planet's largest country, but RGS has almost 3,000 ‘points of presence'. The carrier operates 10 regional centers, 76 regional branches, and more than 2,700 agencies and sales outlets, and writes virtually any kind of coverage, serving all regions in Russia.
Historically, RGS has relied on geographically-dispersed branch offices to serve local regions. Branches operated independently, with no centralized management visibility or process controls. Processes were highly manual and staff skill levels varied from region to region resulting in inconsistent claims handling and an increased potential for claims leakage and adjustment expenses, missed recovery opportunities and claim fraud.
"We have gained the ability
to have visibility into our operations, to better control costs and processes and ultimately to better serve
our customers."
Customer service levels could not be guaranteed and claims growth was increasing 25% year over year, resulting in management recognition that RGS would need to completely transform its organizational structure, people, processes and technologies.
At that time, Guidewire had no deployments in Russia, no product in the language or employees that spoke Russian. "Guidewire and ClaimCenter won us over nonetheless," said Ekaterina Gelfand, Chief Project Officer, RGS. "We found ClaimCenter to be a very flexible system with an easy-to-use interface. We can configure all of our claims handling best practices into the system for claims handling consistency by all of our users, and management will have visibility into every step of the claims handling process – providing the level of transparency we were looking for, and enabling us to better manage our operating costs."
Solution Implementation
"No vendor has ever succeeded in implementing a modern claims handling system in Russia. Guidewire was able to confidently demonstrate its strong track record of implementation successes in other countries," said Gelfand. "We believed in Guidewire and they believed in us; it's really that simple."
"The Guidewire team collaborated with us, shared our objectives and our vision for the project and kept us
on track. It was really an
ideal team coming together
to do great work."
The ClaimCenter project team quickly assembled and began its work. "We had a clear vision of what we wanted to accomplish going into this project and were empowered and supported by RGS management along the way," Gelfand adds. "Our small team was excited by the possibilities of what we were doing, the challenge of the task, and how a successful deployment would improve claims handling for our company."
"Guidewire introduced us to the Agile development methodology which we used to implement our project," said Yuliya Molostova, ClaimCenter Project Manager, RGS. "These methodologies enabled us to involve the business users right from the beginning of the project. With Agile, we were able to quickly incorporate their feedback into the next development cycle/sprint, and demonstrate the changes a few weeks later. This enabled us to manage expectations and get users excited about the technology changes that were on the way."
"We deployed ClaimCenter region by region, prioritizing the regions by volume of claims handled," Molostova said. "Initial deployment of the base system began in May 2007 and has continued non-stop since then. We have gotten very good at user training, system roll-outs and post-deployment support. We have a full-time team doing just this. As soon as one region is live, the team moves to the next region." By the end of 2008, RGS had deployed ClaimCenter to 58 regions. Full deployment to all regions concluded in February 2009. This approach allowed for quick benefits and reduced the overall project risk.
Benefits
RGS is well on its way to realizing its claims handling transformation vision. One-day settlement cycles on simple claims are now commonplace (prior to ClaimCenter these claims took weeks). Claims settlement processes have been standardized and adjuster training times have been shortened. "Guidewire has enabled us to realize key corporate and project objectives," Gelfand said. "We have gained the ability to have visibility into our operations, to better control costs and processes and ultimately to better serve our customers."
About Rosgosstrakh
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As roll-outs continued across Russia, RGS was busy adding new lines of business to ClaimCenter, building out additional system functionality, and extending its internal and external system integrations.
"Our use of Agile, a great team, and strong management vision and project support enabled our success," concludes Molostova.
"Guidewire was open and honest with us throughout this process. They delivered what they promised," Gelfand adds. "ClaimCenter works beautifully. The software is every bit as flexible, well architected, and fully functional as Guidewire told us it was. And the Guidewire team collaborated with us, shared our objectives and our vision for the project and kept us on track. It was really an ideal team coming together to do great work."