Why a Policyholder Portal Halves Your Inbound Calls

Count the calls your practice takes in a week and sort them by reason. In most loss assessing firms the biggest category by far is the policyholder asking what is happening. Not complaining, not instructing: asking. Each call takes five minutes, interrupts something else, and ends with you saying what you said last week. A policyholder portal exists to answer that question before it is asked. Here is what it does, what it should show, and why the practices that have one stop dreading Monday mornings.

Why policyholders ring

A home insurance claim is, for most people, the most stressful administrative process of their decade. They do not know the stages, they do not know the timescales, and silence from the insurer feels like silence from everyone. They ring you because you are the one who picks up. The call is not a complaint about you; it is a symptom of not knowing where things stand.

Three things reduce the calls: telling them the stages at the start, telling them when a stage changes, and giving them somewhere to look in between. The first two are messages. The third is the portal.

What a portal should show

A policyholder portal is a page the customer logs into from a link, on their phone, and sees their claim. Keep it to what they want to know:

• The stage. One of the six, with a plain-English line under it: “Your scope of works is with the insurer. We chase them every few days and will tell you as soon as there is a response.”
• What you need from them. The outstanding documents, with an upload button. Half the calls become uploads.
• What you hold. The documents and photographs on the file, so they can check that the receipt they sent arrived.
• The next date. The inspection booking, the day you expect a response, the date of your last chaser.
• The messages. Everything you have sent them, in one thread, so “did you get my email?” has an answer.

What it should not show: the insurer’s internal correspondence, your notes, your fee calculation, or anything you would not want read aloud at a mediation.

What changes in the practice

The phone goes quieter. Firms that switch on a portal with stage messages typically see the “any news?” calls fall by half or more within a month, because the answer is now on the customer’s phone before they think to ask.

Documents arrive faster. An upload button on a page the customer already looks at beats an email asking them to find an attachment.

You look like a firm. A portal with your name on it, a logged timeline and a next date reads as organised. For a trade where the policyholder has just been let down by an institution, organised is the brand.

Complaints get shorter. When something does go wrong, the customer can see what was done and when. Most complaints are about silence, and a portal is the opposite of silence.

What it does not do

It does not replace the phone call that matters: the one where you explain an offer and advise whether to accept it. It does not replace the message at each stage change; the portal is where they look, the message is what makes them look. And it does not help if it is out of date, which is why it has to be fed by the same system that runs the claim, not updated by hand.

How ClaimFlow does it

The policyholder portal is included on the Professional and Practice plans. It is driven by the claim record: move a claim to the next stage and the portal, the stage message and the task list all update from that one action. The policyholder logs in from a link in their stage message, with no password to remember, and sees exactly the list above. Your firm’s name and logo are on it, not ours.

Further reading

• The six-stage claims pipeline every practice should run
• FCA-regulated claims management: records, communications and systems