You know, it’s probably at a point now where the handwriting and all that sort of stuff, that used to be a really good guide, is dying out. That’s the dilemma we face – we’re trying to get 100 per cent of legitimate claims expedited as quickly as we can, but you’ve still got to have that quality piece there are as well, and it’s those two forces that are against each other. Richard Weatherhead: One thing Rice Warner is seeing is the industry exploring more the use of telephone rather than writing. It’s just human nature that if you’re talking to the claimant on the phone, they’re likely to be a lot more open and you can have an interactive discussion with them, and insurers in particular have found that they’re better able to narrow down the requirements of specific things related to that claim or to the circumstances, rather than the long claim form. But then at the same time, you need to have a lot of flexibility for the call centre operators to ask questions off the margin around medical conditions and make judgements over the phone about what the next step will be.

Michael Bailey: I’d like to ask Peter Blight – because Health Super runs its claims management process internally – does that make it easier to balance ‘the process’ versus the humanising and putting common sense into dealing with claimants? Peter Blight: You can teach process, but you can’t teach necessarily the relationship management skills. And at the risk of using football analogies at this time of the year, the AFL is now recruiting athletes and turning them into footballers, not recruiting footballers and trying to turn them into athletes. If you don’t get the right person who can manage the relationship, you can have a disaster, and you regularly do if all that the person is worried about is process. We changed a couple of years ago to put more emphasis on whether our staff have the people management skills, more so than whether they know claims. I’m not trying to belittle the knowledge you need around managing claims, but you are following a very rigid process, in the main.

If you can’t handle that bit where you pick up the phone and get the member to understand what the issue is, to be able to calm them down, the distress that you do regularly have these people in just gets heightened even more. Damien Mu: If you want to build a new cultural attitude towards claims, you’ve got to bring your people along that journey. You’ve got to get them away from the KPIs we’ve set for them in the past – like what can you get done in 24 hours or two days. We’re not promoting the right type of behaviour by setting those traditional types of standards. So electronic lodgement; yes, we can get that form in quicker. But unless you actually have the tele-assess over it or the tele-collect to go with it and actually have someone talking to the claimant, you’re not going to be able to triage to work out what are the specific requirements from there. We’ve got to overlay the pre-risk management, but at the same time remove some of that fear factor for the claims manager –that, as Arleen mentioned before, someone’s going to audit you and you’re going to get in trouble if you make a bit more of a subjective decision about something because you’ve had a conversation with someone.