Exceptional Claims Customer Service

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.

Exceptional Claims Customer Service forManagers

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.

Interviewing and Hiring Great Adjusters

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.

Staying in Your Conversation: The Best Kept Secret of Great Negotiators

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.

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.

Driving Employee Performance: Inspiring Employees to Improve Themselves

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.

Reservation of Rights Letters

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.

The Opening Statement: A powerful negotiation technique

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.

Managing Stress: It's Easier Than You Think

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.

• 12:00pm - 5:30pm - Golf Tournament at the Floating Green Golf Course
  This par 71 course was designed by Scott Miller who worked with the Jack Nicklaus Organization for 10 years. The course features lake views from all 18 holes and awards include a 5-Star Designation from Golf Digest - one of only 16 out of 6,200 courses rated to receive the top designation - and Readers Choice, Golf Magazine: Gold Medal Award - Designated among the Top 20 Courses in America. Your golf experience will include one caddie per foursome, Laser Distance Reader (the only golf course in the world to use them!) and custom designed carts with heated seats, tilt steering, tee dispenser, beverage cart cooler and other features.

  (Note: This event is optional and a separate fee is required - See the registration form for details on signing up for the tournament).

• 1:00pm - 4:00pm - Picnic Lunch and Scenic Cruise
  Guests will enjoy a?box lunch on the?patio and then jump on the cruise boat for a scenic 90 minute tour of the lake - a relaxing afternoon for sure!

  (Note: This event is optional and a separate fee is required - See the registration form for details on signing up for the event).

• 12:00pm - 5:00pm - Wine and Olive Oil Tasting
  Begin the tour with a leisurely lunch at Tito's which features gourmet pizzas baked in traditional hearth stone ovens as well as fresh pasta, homemade soups, sauces and desserts. After lunch, journey on to Coeur d'Alene Olive Oil and taste and create your own Olive Oil. They are harvested on family owned and operated groves. Then on to the Coeur d'Alene Wine Cellars for a tour of the grounds and a sample wine tasting. They vints fine Washington State Wines in scenic north Idaho. From renowned Columbia Valley vineyards, the winery handcrafts award winning Syrahs and Viognier. Note: if group is larger than 20, half of the group will start their tour at Coeur d'Alene Olive Oil and half will start at the winery and then the groups will switch.

  (Note: This event is optional and a separate fee is required - See the registration form for details on signing up for the event).

5 Tips for reducing phone calls

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.

Being a Beacon: The Simplest, Fastest Way to Improve Staff Attitude and Morale

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.

3 Steps to Gaining Customer Cooperation

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 - Pizza Party!

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