Digital claims – an opportunity, not a panacea

Minster Law CEO Shirley Woolham shares her views on the launch of INK, Minster’s new personal injury claims portal and the broader role of digital within the fast-changing personal injury market.

The subject of ‘digital’ holds a rightful place in any discussion around the future of the personal injury sector.

The imminent changes in the market, which stem from the upcoming reforms, mean insurers and brokers will be seeking a super low-cost, at-scale claims servicing capability – so a strong competency in digital servicing needs to be a staple element of any credible law firm seeking to remain in the sector.

However, while digital offers a welcome opportunity for genuine revitalisation of a traditional market, I whole-heartedly disagree with the rhetoric that digital is some kind of panacea to good customer service.

Recognising the different needs of customers means that simply forcing them down the route of an entirely digital service is likely to create new problems, instead of fixing the existing ones.

The vision behind INK is to see how a better application of digital could be effectively used to put the customer at the heart of the service we provide.

The introduction of INK to the market brings with it a message – anyone who thinks all customers will self-service in their entirety has completely missed the mark.

Granted, there are many customers who are happy to go down a wholly digital journey and for those, INK will enable them to do exactly that.

Nevertheless, there are, for a multitude of reasons, many customers who continue to not only need, but value, the human touch.

With INK, we have merged together Minster Law’s deep knowledge and expertise in personal injury with a contemporary digital service to reimagine the claims experience and incorporate new functionality.

Our development of INK began by understanding what the drivers of dissatisfaction are, for our customers, our insurance brand partners and our people.

One of our core values at Minster Law is to find a way – and we are not limiting ourselves to only finding a way with pure digital.

We focussed on applying innovative solutions to those areas of our claims journey where we could deliver the greatest improvements.

Through the innovative application of digital technology alongside the expertise of our people we have created a portal which is absolutely accessible to the end customer but sits within a wider omni-channel service model, to ensure we never lose sight of the ‘person’ in personal injury.

Whenever and wherever the customer needs to participate in the claims process, we simply focused our efforts on making that participation as accessible and as easy as possible – we will take care of everything else.

The psychology in the claims process is complicated, and it was important that INK allowed us to break down the barriers which serve to prevent customers seeing their claims through to settlement.

In the UK, it is a fundamental right that customers who have been injured through no fault of their own should have redress, and I see our role at Minter Law as being able to provide customers with the expert legal help they need without exposing them to what can often be a very confusing and technical legal process.

In that way, it helps people to feel less intimidated by the traditionally daunting legal sector – and so far, the evidence shows our customers like what they see.

We now have over 16,000 customers on our portal with customer satisfaction hitting 95%.

We didn’t just create a portal, we rewrote the claims experience for the customer, re-defining the future for what a personal injury claim will look like and leading the way for digital development in the claimant sector.

As a business we will continue to listen, learn and evolve, and it’s my intention that INK will always remain the example of a high quality, customer centred claims experience.

We’ll keep improving, we’ll keep delivering and we’ll keep moving forward.

To find out more about our new portal click here.