Insurance Companies Leverage Mobility to Provide Safety During Natural Disasters

By Ashley Caputo
TMCnet Web Editor

Mobile solutions can be a critical factor in delegating the fate of somebody in danger, as it provides an open source of communication between two parties. During the most recent natural disaster that hit Oklahoma ServicePower, a provider of integrated field management software products and services that are used to schedule mixed labor resources, mobile workforce tools played a key role during the company’s partnership with insurance companies in its effort to return the state back to normalcy.

For this initiative, insurance companies needed to get inspectors and adjustors to affected areas immediately so policy holders could get their lives back in order as soon as possible. “Using our ServiceScheduling product, insurers can schedule field employees where they need to be to address damage,” says Mark Duffin, CEO Service Power. “Scheduling enables them to utilize field employees from outside the area by setting up short term geographical coverage or alternative shifts, or utilize normally non- scheduled resources like supervisors, or even third-party contractors, very quickly.”

Mark Duffin, CEO of Service Power

Scheduling also eliminates as much travel time between jobs based on proprietary travel matrix, which is pre-calculated, stored in memory and weighed by factors like traffic congestion and time-of-day variability, which inherently moves field resources from job to job most quickly.

According to Duffin, insurance companies can utilize mobile workforce tools in the following ways: 

1. Using intelligent mobile workforce tools, insurers can ensure that the field resource with the required skills and information is sent to a job or disaster site.
2. Intelligent mobile workforce tools also enable insurers to decrease travel time, which in turn improves response time during catastrophic events.
3. Insurers can also to scale the workforce to include usually non-scheduled resources or third-party contractors from outside the area with mobile workforce scheduling tools, especially those like ServicePower’s products that address every labor channel utilized within the field service process
4. Mobile dispatch software is an especially important tool for any field service or insurance organization.

ServicePower has also been leveraged by several insurance organizations in the U.S. They use ServiceScheduling and ServiceMobility to route field adjusters and inspectors covering property and auto policies, including third-party contractors as well as employees. Most U.S. third party administrators use its ServiceDispatch, ServiceClaims and ServiceStats products to manage their retail and OEM service contract portfolios.

“ServicePower provides a very unique software platform. Our platform is a global, end-to-end platform that enables our client to connect their back office systems, like CRMs used to log FNL (first notice of loss) through a ServicePower single interface (ServiceBroker), and utilize the different software platform components to mix different labor channels, including employees, third-party contractors and on-demand field resources, to achieve, cost, margin, response time and customer satisfaction metrics,” says Duffin. “No other competitive software enables a mixed labor or hybrid labor model.”

ServicePower also offers the additional components such as ServiceMobility (an HTML5 hybrid product), ServiceGPS and ServiceStats, which enable field service organizations to fully mobilize their workforce and perform forecasting, planning and analysis of the entire process.

Aside from insurance companies, the ServicePower mobile field management platform, according to Duffin, was designed to be industry and job type agnostic. It can be used by any organization required to perform field based services or events, such as repairs, installations, deliveries, inspections and adjustments.

It was also designed to support a mixed or hybrid labor model, enabling clients to mix employees and third-parties to achieve business metrics or address seasonality or catastrophes. For more information on how to leverage mobility workforce during a dire situation, please visit ServicePower.