National Flood Services: Fully Covered
Insurance
Thursday, 31 January 2008
National Flood Services: Fully Covered - American Executive - RedCoat Publishing
P. Michael Jones explains how this flood insurance organization goes above and beyond to service its customers.
In the mad dash to turn the service industry to an entirely electronic format, we sometimes forget the importance of the human touch. P. Michael Jones, president of National Flood Services (NFS), hasn’t. And in the past decade, he has managed to grow an organization in a somewhat finite industry from a processing volume in the low $10 million range of premium to a volume approaching the billion-dollar range.

It’s not that Jones doesn’t recognize the importance of automation. As a fully owned subsidiary of Fiserv, a Fortune 500 technology solutions provider, NFS has the financial wherewithal to access technological innovations. When the insurance industry was rocked with Hurricane Katrina and the massive number of flood insurance claims in the following years, Jones recognized the need to have a high speed and accurate front-end system for transmitting claims data and providing claims stakeholders automated access to claims information. And for the company’s users, the 70-plus client companies participating in the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), receiving that information and passing it along to their clients and policyholders in a timely manner was crucial.

“Katrina and associated hurricanes of 2004 and 2005 made it imperative that we develop a system to move claims data electronically,” Jones said. “One of the most important parts of our business is our ability to process policies in the most expeditious and accurate manner. In the past few years, we’ve gone from an environment in which 90% of our processing was manual to an environment that’s 75% automated.”

The other 25%
But the 25% that isn’t automated, the personal touch of each of the company’s 350-plus employees, is the heart of NFS’s success. As one of the company’s main tenets is continuous improvement, its internal quality assurance program ensures employees dealing directly with customers have the latest information on NFIP or any changes that would impact how they respond to a question or rate a policy. The company’s full-time training program provides each employee the tools needed to maintain the company’s reputation for accuracy.

“The team at NFS constantly looks for ways to improve the process, and it could be as simple as imaging every document coming in the door,” said Dianne Parker, senior vice president, Fiserv Insurance Group. “And it’s not only Mike coming up with the improvements; it’s his whole team.”

“It’s a democracy of innovation,” continued Jones. “Ideas for improvement are embraced, and employees are proud not only of the solutions but also of the process.”

For the IT department, the program is more of a cultural orientation. For customer service representatives, training can take up to six months. At the end of 2007, NFS signed a large client that will make a significant impact on its bottom line for 2008. According to Jones, one of the main reasons the client chose NFS was the company’s reputation for excellent service and the comfort the client felt with the NFS staff and its knowledge, friendliness, and competence. At NFS, the client was given free range to talk to anyone and ask questions on any topic at varying levels of difficulty.

“We’re careful in how we direct our customers based on the customer service reps experience and knowledge,” Jones said. “We identify our callers by their phone number and direct them to the most appropriate staff member on an automated basis.”

Another of the primary tenets of NFS is that the phones will always be answered with a live voice. If the origin of the call, for example, is South Carolina, the client will automatically be directed to the customer service team handling the region. If someone is not available from that team, it will ring to another available representative or to the receptionist. As long as it’s humanly possible, said Jones, every call will be answered with a live voice.

A higher level
Even with this level of success, Jones still sees room for improvement and growth. NFS has become the dominant player in the flood processing business, and the opportunities for flood processing growth, although still out there in many ways, are not as incredible as when the company first began.

“When we started, we were very much like Avis when the company was number two and striving to be number one,” he said. “But through it all, we’ve always wanted to be the answer to any flood question from our clients.”

In December, NFS took that desire to another level by partnering with Markel American Insurance Company’s excess flood program for residential and non-residential properties. The program will provide clients in Alabama, Arizona, California, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Virginia with coverage in excess of the NFIP. “The excess programs are not ours, but we do make them available for agents to write,” explained Jones. “We’ve had an excess flood program for a number of years, but this relationship with Markel will allow us additional capacity and additional states we’ve been unable to penetrate in the past.”

As NFS continues to expand with opportunities like Markel and a diversification into processing other lines of insurance, the one element Jones wants to make clear is that, at the heart of it, the company is an insurance management organization and not just a computer service operation. The difference, he said, is in the employees’ in-depth understanding of insurance, which enhances their ability to discuss a wide-range of topics with their client insurance company’s agents. “We understand that from an insurance perspective we’re doing more than computer work,” he said. “We’re responding to the needs of the insurance community, whether it is for an insurance company or an insurance agent.”
 
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