Mike Stapleton, senior vice president, claims administration atCNA, responded to some questions about the technology factors thataffect the way CNA and its claims unit operate and how technologyis affecting the performance—and the demands—of adjusters.

PropertyCasualty360: What is the state of your claimsadministration system? If it is a legacy system, what are thedrawbacks? If you have upgraded your technology, what kind ofbenefits have you seen?

Stapleton: We have both a legacy system and an upgraded system.Four years ago we started to build what we call One Claim Platform.We have a commercial claim organization and a specialty claimorganization. They were on different platforms. On commercial weembarked on a program that introduced a claim platform and we havenow upgraded to a current model for commercial claims. That wasdonein November of 2010.

We've migrated a portion of our specialty claims operation andwe plan to have thatdone in another year. Having two systemscreates its own sets of challenges around data integrity,financials, and people working in duel environments and createsmore inefficiency.

This helps to support the culture around One Claim Platform. Thenew platform provides more robust data; it gets away from adjustorsdocumenting so many files; and utilizes more structured data.Before, if you couldn't find it in the file notes, you couldn'tfind it anywhere.

Our claims field organization helped us build the new platformwith areas such as what would be needed in their claim file. We canextract a multitude of data for whatever reports or knowledge wemight need. It served a lot of internal needs to put one source ofdata in places where it is needed.

PropertyCasualty360: In what way istechnology changing how adjusters perform their jobs? What kind ofsavings can a company achieve through a more effective use of theirtime?

Stapleton: We are all looking to leverage technology to theability we can. There are variables that come into play, but one ofthe things we incorporated here was moving to a paperless claimenvironment. For a commercial carrier with the type of claims wehave and our volume of claims, it was quite an undertaking.

That was the first major step for us and we continue to move ourteams to be comfortable in the paperless claims world. That's theway claims are sent today—email or an electronic format—and we wantto make sure our environment supports our customers, our vendors,and any individual the claims department interacts with.

Having that piece of paper no longer sitting in front of themhas been an adjustment, so we've spent a lot of time around changemanagement and training and allowing individuals to grow in thatenvironment. They probably feel a lot better about this today thanthey did three years ago when we embarked on this journey.

These have changed the expectations of the adjusters to performon a timely basis because they have better access to informationand the ability to make decisions quickly. There's an expectationfrom our customers that we have this availability of informationand the ability to respond quicker than we did in the past.

When you look at BlackBerries and mobile devices, we are alwaysavailable to our customers. It's not the nine-to-five we used tohave. We are always attached to that device because it is our linkto our customers and individuals who may need us.

PropertyCasualty360: How is the roleof the adjuster changing with your company? Are you supplementingyour staff to independent adjusters? What must be done to sustainthe quality of adjusters working in the p&cindustry?  

Stapleton: Technology can't take the place of experience. Itcan't take the place of the complete knowledge and someone's gutfeelings—all those things that those senior people bring—and theexpectation to share with the new people coming on board.

How do you take that knowledge and experience and put it in away that those new to the industry will understand it and in aformat they are comfortable with? Whether that is webinars,personal seminars or meetings, on-the-road training, or—taking astep back—having face-to-face contact with people like I did when Igot into the claims world.

New people are used to communicating with text, email, voicemailand thing like that and youdon't learn like that. The challenge isto take that blend of street smarts and experience and share itwith new people and in a format that is conducive to the people weare hiring today.

The people today are in a better position today than I was 30years ago because they have more access to information. They seemto be energized by the Internet and how to obtain information.That's what we need: people who are inquisitive and interested ingrowing their knowledge in different ways.