EXCLUSIVE: “Moving the Dial on Trust: a New and Better Way to Assess Risk With Voice” – Jules Ehrlich, Clearspeed in ‘The Insurtech Magazine’

Clearspeed’s voice-based risk assessment technology is a gamechanger for insurers, says Jules Ehrlich, its Chief Product and Strategy Officer. Here, he explains how insurers are using voice analytics to quickly and confidently assess risk across the policyholder lifecycle in ways that streamline the customer experience, accelerate payment of the right claims, and better identify potential fraud

With data and analytics capabilities foundational for insurers, accelerating the customer experience through automation and advanced technologies is a key area to drive improvements and streamline workflows.

Today, insurers can leverage big data and AI capabilities with historical and even real-time information for more insight, but that can bring complexity, increase false positives and may not provide the validation needed to confidently assess risk across the insurance lifecycle quickly and accurately. Identifying risk today often relies on data that can be inaccurate and incomplete, if available at all, or it’s simply too resource-intensive to effectively parse for true indicators of risk. Organisations are continually evolving their approach to risk assessment, navigating the changing landscape and evaluating if their practices are fast enough and accurate enough to meet the moment.

With an entirely unique approach to analysing voice, Clearspeed provides an assessment of individual risk quickly and with a high degree of precision. This enables better, faster decision-making and remedies the tradeoff between speed and confidence. Providing this real-time direct primary measure of human risk is why the United States government and the world’s largest insurance companies are using the Clearspeed platform for risk insight at scale.

Our clients are extremely encouraged by the outcomes it’s driving within their organisations, with insurers seeing a massive leap in resource optimisation and an accelerated customer journey after implementing the technology within their workflows.

Trust events

We believe that trust, and enabling trust, is an insurer’s competitive advantage in a market where it’s increasingly difficult to identify risk and fraud at scale – and easier than ever for bad actors to partake in fraudulent behaviour due to the pervasiveness of sophisticated technology. But what does enabling trust mean in the context of insurance, and, more broadly, our day-to-day lives?

While the risk landscape continues to evolve faster than ever before, one thing remains constant – human nature. Individual risk will always exist and every transaction made requires an assessment of that individual risk, whether making a decision to approve an application, pay a claim, hire an employee, or vet a new supplier. We call these millions of moments in a given day in which a decision is made and trust is exchanged ‘trust events’.

“We believe that trust, and enabling trust, is an insurer’s competitive advantage in a market where it’s increasingly difficult to identify risk and fraud at scale”

In these events – where there is an exchange between an insurer and the insured, for example – it is challenging to assess risk quickly and at scale, due to both gaps in current technology and available resources. There’s also a negative impact on the customer experience if you put every customer through an extended verification process and treat them as a bad actor. Our belief is that it’s possible to fast-track genuine customers while. pinpointing only those who require more follow-up, all through identifying risk characteristics in the voice.

This is what getting to trust, faster means when you use Clearspeed. You can think of it like a metal detector at an airport when you go through departures – it doesn’t care who you are or where you’re from, just whether you’re carrying anything made from metal. Clearspeed simply provides a low- to high-risk alert, just like the metal detector.

Getting flagged doesn’t mean that you don’t fly, it just indicates the need for someone to follow up. If you’re clear, you’re good to go. In the same way, low-risk claimants, for example, can move forward quickly, with a straight-through or expedited process that gets them paid faster, while adjusters can focus their expertise where potential risk is flagged, driving both a better customer experience and a more optimised process for the insurer. How the platform works Insurers deliver short, automated voice questionnaires to their customers, connecting with them by phone, app, chatbot or web.

Insurers can choose from the Clearspeed library of questions that have been hugely successful with other insurers or create their own questions, specific to their unique use case. Using the responses to a set of simple yes/no
questions, our proprietary technology maps vocal characteristics associated with risk into a data model. These vocal characteristics are universal to everyone, regardless of language, gender, race, location, credit score, age, or other personal identifiers. Clearspeed analyses and evaluates the questionnaire responses and provides a risk assessment result.

This is an entirely new approach to voice analytics.

There are a few essential features to understand with Clearspeed:

• Automated delivery means that the questions are asked the same way, in the same voice, every time. And it offers consistent around-the-clock availability
• The questionnaires are language-agnostic, making it easy to accommodate every customer
• This assessment is objective and unbiased, since we use automated questionnaires and map vocal characteristics associated with risk that are universal to everyone

Driving value for insurers

Insurers have many opportunities to benefit from deploying Clearspeed across the insurance lifecycle, whether at application, underwriting, claim, or renewal stage. At underwriting, things like smoking or drug use, pre-existing medical conditions, improper vehicle use, or even deficient home conditions may be hidden by applicants in the hope of approval or lower premiums. Risk factors may also appear as fraudulent policy applications with fictitious beneficiaries or duplicate policies.

Clearspeed can help uncover risk indicators quickly to enable confident application routing and prevent future claims fraud at the point of application. At claims, insurers rely on a collection of external data sources and prior knowledge of the claimant. This can introduce a form of bias, as the insight is modelled on demographic information and historical behaviours, versus focussing strictly on the individual and a moment in time.

“Insurers have seen significant ROI and resource optimisation using Clearspeed at different points in the value chain”

Aggregating and connecting data collected from claim submissions – whether historical or real-time – to gain claims insight can add complexity and may not provide the validation needed to process claims quickly and accurately, contributing to a lengthy and costly investigation service, and, ultimately frustrating customers. And when faced with high claim volumes, the process can’t be consistently expedited without sacrificing thoroughness, accuracy, and a satisfactory level of risk assessment.

Clearspeed solves for this, to triage early in the claims process so adjusters can better identify, prioritise, and route claims – a win when faced with both volume and resource challenges. Further downstream, an adjuster or special investigation unit (SIU) investigator will relish the precise risk data that Clearspeed provides to inform their next steps. Voice analysis is refreshing with its ability to assess risk, independent of any other data, adding unique insights for a more confident decision-making process, and to complement or enhance insights from existing sources.

Faster risk assessment – and at scale

Insurers have seen significant ROI and resource optimisation using Clearspeed at different points in the value chain, including:

• Accelerating genuine claims while dissuading the disingenuous with a 40 per cent rise in immediate settlements and 11 per cent walkaway rate
• Focussed follow-up on claims where risk is evident, with a 50 per cent reduction in average claims handling time
• Reducing claims leakage, resulting in a 36 per cent lift in average preventative fraud savings per claim and $900 average fraud loss savings per claim
• Enhancing validation outcomes, leading to a 65 per cent reduction in investigation spend
• Improving the claims experience for genuine customers, including a five-star customer experience rating with inclusion of the Clearspeed questionnaire

This also means insurers can potentially rethink parts of their process. For example, if Clearspeed provides a low-risk score on a low-value travel claim, maybe you won’t bother incurring the time and expense to request a receipt and further review it. Or, you may embed Clearspeed at application to validate and then verify information as it moves through your process to reduce the overall number of steps your genuine customers go through.

In fact, you will absolutely delight your policyholders and Clearspeed will provide a new level of assurance for the decisions your teams are making. Further expediting and automating the customer experience also naturally means lower operating costs.

With our clients, Clearspeed is redefining risk assessment with unparalleled accuracy, speed, and simplicity – all by focussing on getting to trust, faster.

This article was published in The Insurtech Magazine Issue 11, Page 4-6