Holding onto experienced claims adjusters is critical to running a successful business in this industry. If you’re not creating the type of work environment that facilitates a healthy lifestyle, adjusters will succumb to the stress and decide to move on.
High adjuster turnover can have a negative impact on your business, resulting in poor customer experience and bloated recruiting and training costs to name just a few problems.
It’s important to create a work environment and corporate culture that will attract top talent and keep your best employees around for a long time to come. But what can you do to prevent adjusters from burning out and decrease employee turnover you ask?
Here are 5 things worth considering:
1. Focus on the Positives and Praise Good Work
Claims adjusters often get a bad rap - claimants may view them as someone who’s looking to deny or minimize the value of their claim. And no one wants to feel like the bad guy! It can lead to job dissatisfaction and burnout. The role of an adjuster isn’t like many else out there which is why this requires special attention.
It’s critical to highlight the positive impacts that adjusters can make on people’s lives. In some scenarios, the people they interact with have suffered from severe loss. They’re not there to screw the claimant out of a few dollars, it’s an opportunity to help them along their road to recovery.
When employees go above and beyond for claimants, it’s important to recognize their good work and praise them accordingly. It gives them that boost in confidence they deserve and highlights what best-in-class looks like for the rest of the team.
2. Give Adjusters the Authority to Make an Impact
Don’t let claimants get to that point where they become angry, hire an attorney, and start taking matters into their own hands. A lack of communication with their insurance provider can pile on to the burden they’re already facing.
When adjusters have the authority to streamline the process by answering questions and making decisions without further delay, it helps to ease the situation. Adjusters can add real value when they’re given the opportunity to take control.
Being on-site or hands-on enables them to provide a higher level of customer service. It opens them up to preventing expensive claims by intervening early - before costs rack up. And when those costs or details don’t add up compared to similar claims, they’ll have an easier job of detecting and thwarting fraud.
3. Career Advancement Opportunities
Ambitious employees will want a clear path to work towards their career goals. Acknowledging and supporting employees from the beginning makes them feel valued and will make an impact on long-term employee retention.
Start as early as the recruitment and onboarding process to help employees create a career development plan. Identify and manage their goals and expectations to make their personal development a collaborative process.
Understanding individual employee goals and ambitions is only half the battle though. It helps to provide training programs that will encourage and fuel their personal growth and accelerate career advancement.
4. An Adjuster is Only as Good as Their Tools
Adjusters are constantly juggling files, data, and other critical information to get the job done. The tools and systems they use have a direct impact on their efficiency. But when they’re stuck using antiquated systems and dated approaches, duct-taped together by various software, it can be frustrating.
Investing in the technology that streamlines their workflows and makes them more productive is a win-win. The faster an adjuster can get the job done, the less chance they’ll have to get stressed and burnt out. By reducing the burden of administrative workload, adjusters will experience a more enjoyable workday.
Having the right tools in place can help them visualize data through dashboards and receive real-time information. Task automation saves time on reporting, assigning and tracking tasks, or even help process payments. And a paperless claims process eliminates time spent shuffling paperwork around and reduces redundant data entry.
5. Mandatory Case Limits
High caseloads can create a lot of stress for adjusters. Asking your team if they can handle another case is not a good measure of whether or not they can actually do so. Most likely they will tell you they can, then get frustrated when they get bogged down with the additional workload.
By setting a maximum case limit for adjusters, you bypass the issue of overloading your team. It’s no longer a question of whether or not they can handle that extra case, you know exactly how much bandwidth they have to take on more work.
As a bonus, having a transparent tracking system in place provides management clearer insights into how much work is manageable using internal resources at a given time. This can help better prepare you and budget for outside resources to take on case overflow.
Just Make Sure you Have a Plan in Place
There are a number of ways you can work with adjusters to keep them happy, these are just a few. Get creative, all you need is a plan and clear communication with employees to help reduce turnover. Collaborate with them, their feedback and input are invaluable.
And when the busy season hits, don’t put that added stress back on employees after working so hard to keep them happy. Reach out to us for your claims overflow and we’ll be happy to help the team out!
US Claim Solutions is here with extensive knowledge and expertise in both field and desk adjusting. We’re available to service clam needs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Email us at customerservice@usclaimsolutions.com or give us a call at (888) 701-1153.
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