We were delighted to win not only one, but two awards at this year’s Insurance Times Claims Excellence Awards. The awards are designed to recognise, reward and celebrate excellence across the claims industry.

Our Virtual Reality Training proposition won the Claims Training Excellence Award and our Speech Analytics System won the Claims Product Solution of the Year – Service Management category. Both of our winning solutions were ideas that were born and nurtured through our internal disruptive thinking programme, and they have been developed and brought to market by our employees who thought of the ideas.

VR Training is our cutting-edge training platform that immerses users into a fully simulated environment. It encourages knowledge retention, drives empathy by putting our claims handlers in the shoes of the policyholders, and encourages a more embedded interest in training and support self-learn opportunities.

The judges commented: “Their virtual reality platform empowers employees to learn in an innovative and interesting way, as well as promoting knowledge retention with 1500 staff already having gone through the training.”

Our speech analytics system enables our clients to assess 100% of the calls that are handled by their agents. The analytics system was first deployed to support Vitality’s claims handling. It has since been rolled out to several other areas of the business, including retention. In the three months after deployment, the lapse rate improved by 13% – equivalent to £900k a month.

The judges commented: “A strong entry that really showed the way and helped to smooth the process for the customer. This was a really smart and stand-out use of technology.”