It is a truth universally acknowledged that adjuster licensing is a difficult mess if you intend to work across state lines. In fact, on this very blog, we’ve covered it here and here.
Despite the numerous challenges, state requirements including claims processing time limits and consumer protections necessitate insurance carriers to maintain a stable of trained and compliant adjusters ready to act at any time.
With manual processes it can be a challenge to know each adjuster’s status in every state at all times. Here are five ways adding adjuster licensing automations can help.
1. Make it easier to dial up your adjuster force in times of crisis
The reality is, carriers seldom need adjusters en masse, except for when disaster strikes. When there are no storm clouds in the sky, and no rumblings underneath your feet, no smoke hazing the air, keeping your adjuster force appropriately sized is a matter of give and take. You want enough adjusters to cover claims, but not so many that you have people sitting around twiddling their thumbs.
However, when disaster strikes, when earthquakes rock a city, when storms or wildfires touch much of your book of business, suddenly you need more adjusters than are available anywhere.
Instead of manually hunting out adjusters and applying manually for each one to get an emergency license in the effected state, imagine having the tools to know who’s already licensed and ready to deploy. Envision assigning emergency territories in advance of a storm surge, or being able to apply for nonresident adjuster licenses in bulk.
It’s precisely in these peak emergencies when you need all hands on deck, that small inconsistencies in your adjuster license compliance process can become a monumental problem. By waiting for storms to catch up with you, you risk tripping just at the moment when you need speed and accuracy.
2. Eliminate errors in claims processing before they happen
By using an automated compliance solution such as AgentSync Manage, AgentSync Autopilot, or AgentSync ProducerSync API plugged into your overall adjuster management system (AMS), you can enforce compliance and streamline your adjuster licensing.
With data that’s synchronized daily and drawn from a source of truth, you can ensure that every adjuster examining claims for your carrier is appropriately qualified for the business they’re responsible for. Instead of wondering which adjusters and their tiny errors will trip you up just when you’re processing the most claims, you can validate their licenses at the point of assignment.
When you assign business based on good-faith efforts, you’re taking on some unintentional risks. If you harm your relationship with your client by having to stall or stop the claims payout process because of errors with adjuster licensing, the reputational risk could go well beyond a single client. If you have to reassign multiple adjusters to a case, you risk your client’s repeat business and customer churn. You also risk an upset customer with legitimate grievances filing a complaint against you with a state regulator. At the very least, you earn yourself a poor rating on online reviews or with the Better Business Bureau.
3. Prevent license errors from spiraling out of control
In a more nightmarific scenario, one inappropriately licensed adjuster becomes a slew of customers complaints from people whose claims your carrier assigned to someone with out-of-order licensing. When consumer complaints reach a state department of insurance, as you likely know, the DOI isn’t limited to only looking at the complaints and their immediate causes.
Consumer complaints often spur investigations that become more expansive as state DOIs have new reasons to look closer at a carrier’s processes and products. A carrier’s worst nightmare is a single state’s investigation that reveals small but important compliance violations in other areas of the business. As we’ve written about previously, these small investigations can slowly expand in scope and across states until a company is facing an investigation by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC), or individually by every state in which the carrier operates.
At a minimum, a carrier could face a quick fine. And, at a maximum, they could face years of investigations and untold man hours lost to hunting down every request from state department of insurance lawyers, and countless hours of bills from outside attorneys brought in to handle the process.
Viewed through this lens, you can see how essential it is to have experienced adjusters with clean records working in your corner. Automated adjuster licensing verifications are not simply a nice to have, they are a need to have.
4. Control your license and renewal costs
If you have in-house adjusters and staff adjusters, using automated compliance solutions, you can see which states you pay for licensing in. By taking a calculated approach to who needs a license and where, you can control costs and build a strategic plan before emergency storm season.
Instead of paying for emergency licenses and scrambling to cover your needs, or paying for your adjusters to be licensed in every single state they possibly can be, automated licensing data empowers you to be judicious about geography and cost.
With digital access and bulk transactions, products like AgentSync manage can even make emergency adjuster licensing easier for states that process them. By having organized and automated data, you can apply for licenses in bulk when and where you need them. Even in states with individual portals where each adjuster must apply for emergency licensing individually, data portability through easy export functions make it easier to handle these manual technical processes.
5. Know your business risk and use your business data
Many of us want to make smarter business decisions, but without business data that’s clean and well organized, no one can actually do so. Most of us have disorganized, dirty data that’s sitting around on sticky notes, in spreadsheets, and spread across disparate iterations of legacy systems. By streamlining your data into one comprehensive view, you can actually make use of the information you already have.
So, if you’re ready for adjuster compliance, but done better, AgentSync is here to help. For more on how to use automation for your adjuster compliance, schedule an individualized demo today.