Awesome Claims Customer Service for Adjusters

Back by popular demand, this workshop will appeal to claims professionals of all levels of experience and expertise. Most claims people know the customer rarely recognizes outstanding customer service during the claims process because they are so worried about the outcome. Because of this, it is extremely important for claims professionals to be able to recognize and deliver outstanding customer service without the acknowledgment of the customer along the way.

In this course, participants will understand the basics of providing high quality customer service, learn proper telephone techniques, gain insight into understanding what individual customers need, manage the customer's perception, as well as understand the essential role customer service plays in the success of the claims department.

Awesome Claims Customer Services for Supervisors and Managers

This customer service class for supervisors and managers is back by popular demand! It is extremely important for claims supervisors and managers to be able to provide guidance to their staff when it comes to recognizing and delivering outstanding customer service. In this course, participants will understand the basics of providing high quality customer service and a way to pass them on to their claims staff.

Some specific topics include: handling the telephone, effective listening, managing objections, asking questions, delivering bad news, managing different customer behaviors, managing the voice mail system, managing customer call backs, statements to avoid, closing conversations, attitude as the key to success, and an action plan for better service.

Policy Interpretation Made Easy – So Easy You Can Teach It.

Claims managers are usually very good at interpreting coverage, and sharing their thought with their team. However, when it comes time to teach a simple process to analyzing coverage, many claims managers get caught up in complicated concepts and rules that only serve to make matters worse.

This session will provide some very important concepts that are essential to anyone analyzing coverage. It will focus mainly on the three parameters required to identify in any coverage situation.

Also, claims supervisors and managers who attend will be given an easy way to explain it and teach it to their team.

Medical Terminology: The Key to Word Building

Rather than just focusing on just a list of common medical terms as encountered by the claims adjuster, this session establishes clear understanding of the structure of medical terms. Common prefixes, suffixes, and root words are reviewed and discussed.

Medicine has a large vocabulary, but you can learn much of it by word building. The goal of this seminar is to increase both the adjuster?s understanding of common medical terms, and also develop the skill of breaking down medical terms more easily.

Surveying Team Strengths & Weaknesses - Team Building Games

One of the greatest challenges a manager can face is to find out what the team really thinks of itself. Usually, a manager decides his/her team's strengths and weaknesses alone, and then goes to work on it. Sometimes the manager is right, and sometimes the manager is wrong. However, the most powerful (and accurate) measure of a team?s strengths and weaknesses is rarely used by most managers.

Usually the team itself is a wealth of information on what needs to be focused upon by the team for improvement. Yet just asking them to give input will rarely work.

In this session participants will learn how to properly survey their team members in order to get accurate information on how well they operate as a team, the team's top strengths and the team's greatest weaknesses. Also as important, participants will be given a list of strategies to encourage team communication, as well as a list of things that should be avoided that stifle communication.

Effective Delegation

One of the most powerful tools a manager can master is delegation. However, if done improperly, it can also serve to burden staff and discourage teamwork.

This session focuses on the do?s and don?t of delegation to help managers use delegation as a tool for encouraging extra effort, staff development, initiative and commitment.

Dine Around – Gaslamp Quarter

Join us for the first-ever Claims Education Conference Dine-Around. Featuring five restaurants in San Diego's famous Gaslamp Quarter, a 16-block historical neighborhood featuring dining, shops and nightlife, this event is not to be missed!

Please review the restaurants below and indicate your first and second choice on the registration page. The fee is $15 for round trip transportation. Participants will order off of the menu and pay for their own meal and drinks as well as gratuity, which will be included in each bill. If you are interested in a sponsorship of wine, appetizers or a round of drinks for one of the groups, please contact the Claims Education Conference Office at 952.928.4642.

• Red Pearl Kitchen - www.redpearlkitchen.com/sandiego
The exotic meets the cosmopolitan, Red Pearl Kitchen, a Chinese/East Asian restaurant/bar, and blends a savvy, chic, 1940's Shanghai kind of glamour with upscale, urban and fine-dining sensibility of its proprietors.

• La Fiesta
Step into the small Mexican Village of La Fiesta, where bright colors, hardwood floors, and quaint hand painted chairs create a wonderful, authentic atmosphere.? This upscale Mexican eatery boasts of its famous sizzling fajitas, marinated in exotic chiles and saut?ed with bell peppers, onions, and tomatoes. The house mariscos, Seabass Veracruz and Cilantro-lime Swordfish served will transport you and your guests South of the border.

• Gaslamp Strip Club - A Steak Place - www.gaslampsteak.com
The Gaslamp Strip Club is all about hot grilling and cool martinis in a lounge type atmosphere where guests have the thrill of grilling their own food. The menu consists of "family style" salad with steak selections, fresh seafood and various skewers. The Gaslamp Strip Club features a "select-your-own" wine cellar with 36 wines and a full bar with signature old school martinis. Guests must be 21 and over.

• Blue Point Coastal Cuisine - www.cohnrestaurants.com/cohn/cohnrestaurants/bluepoint.php
Sophistication emanates from this San Francisco style supper club. Noteworthy is Blue Point's unique selection of martinis and the traditional oyster bar featuring fresh oyster appetizers and specialty shooters. House specialties include pan-seared scallops and fresh clam risotto, seared miso marinated seabass and bacon wrapped Stilton crusted filet mignon.

• The Quarter Kitchen - www.quarterkitchen.com
The Quarter Kitchen is a sensual collaboration between Ivy Hotel and celebrity Chef Damon Gordon. The Quarter Kitchen offers unique combinations of simple food, cooked perfectly. Celebrity chef Damon Gordon has been an executive chef at some of the world's most exclusive hotels, including The Royalton Hotel in New York, The Delano in Miami, and St. Martins Lane Hotel in London. From Caviar Tacos to Lobster Pot Pie, Gordon offers diners whimsical combinations that are sure to please both the palate and the imagination.

Telephone Techniques for Claims

Many claims professionals make statements that have an effect opposite of their intent. Things said by the claims professional in order to get a customer to cooperate, or to trust us, or to be reasonable, often become the very barrier. These are simple, honest mistakes that most claims people can change once they realize how the customer hears them. In this session, we will review a better way to get the results we are looking for.

Also, often unknowingly, employees can make a statement that will leave customers with negative perceptions. These are separated into three categories: Careless; Reckless; and Obnoxious. In this session attendees will have the opportunity to review actual statements taken from monitoring transcripts, define the issue, and develop a better way of saying them.

Many claims people will use phrases passed down to them through the years without really appreciating the impact. This is especially true when trying set up an effective negotiation. In this session, we will review 15 common phrases that claims people use quite often that can have a very negative impact on their negotiations with customers.

Effective Office Meetings

Meetings are not new to the workplace. In fact, most organizations have plenty of them. Meetings are held to communicate (share information) plan, problem solve, and so forth. Unfortunately, most people in an organization do not look forward to them. In some places, the meeting is one of the most dreaded events to take place. Why would that be?

Very likely, what is going wrong in the organization is reflected in the organization's meetings. Whether the characteristic is a manager making all the decisions, people's inability or unwillingness to listen, departments publicly administering punishment for mistakes or assigning blame to others for business problems, what goes on in the workplace day to day shows up in its meetings.

This session will help participants learn some common sense rules and techniques to improve the effectiveness of office meetings through the use of topic and outcome planning.

Tracking Claims Staff Training Needs - III Course Offerings

When a claims department is fortunate enough to receive a budget for training, often the management team can struggle with identifying the training needs and finding the training that can solve those issues. Examples include a company thinking they need a training class on how to deal with difficult customers, when in fact they need a class on how to stop frustrating and angering customers.

This session will provide some suggestions on how to track staff training needs and identify the right type of training to offer. It will also include brief review of current courses offered by International Insurance Institute, and how to request a new course be developed especially for your staff.

Golf Tournament at Riverwalk
12:00pm - 5:30pm

OR...

La Jolla, San Diego's Treasured "Jewel"
12:30 - 4:30 PM

OR...

Old-Time City Trolley Tour
1:00 – 5:00 PM

Critical Thinking for Claims

Whether intended or not, we all use strategies of communication that can be deceptive. A good critical thinker is one who can recognize those deceptive strategies to avoid errors in reasoning. This session is designed to teach not only the benefits of critical thinking, but how to put critical thinking to work when making decisions. Claims people are taught how to avoid unreliable reasoning, as well as recognize and evaluate statements, arguments and conclusions.

If you would like to learn how to make good decisions based on cautions review, work through problems to find the best answer, stay focused on the real issues, and apply critical thinking to writing, this session is for you.

Working To Do Lists for Managers – Priorities vs. Importance

Many managers do the best job they can working from some type of list of things they have to accomplish that day or week. It can be quite frustrating however when a manager feels they can?t even get to the things on the list because of things that just pop up during the day. Because of this, many managers have tossed aside a very powerful tool simply because of the fact they view their list as a static document.

This session will focus on "The working To Do list", which allows a manager to deal with emergencies and extra work that comes up during the day without feeling constantly interrupted. The working To Do list requires a little training on changing the focus from what is "important" to what is a "priority". They ARE NOT the same thing.

Learn to avoid the big mistakes many managers make when trying to write up and work off of a To Do list, and find out you really can leave work at the end of the day feeling like you got a lot accomplished.

Managing Change

Also back by popular demand, claims managers will learn how to develop a motivating influence during times of change. Throughout this session you will learn how to rise to the challenge of management changes, office procedure changes, and work load changes.

SPECIFIC TOPICS INCLUDE:

Successful change management - Understanding what we even mean.

Picking the right people - Get the right people in place with the right emotional commitment, and the right mix of skills and levels.

Involve and communicate - Involve as many people as possible, communicate the essentials simply, and appeal and respond to people's needs. De-clutter communications; make technology work for you rather than against.

Getting things moving - Remove obstacles. Enable constructive feedback and lots of support from leaders. Reward and recognize progress and achievements.

NOTE - There is no Presentation Tips

Closing Comments and Lunch

Carl Van, President & CEO, International Insurance Institute, Inc.