Your five numbers
Start with one segment — a windscreen and a bodily-injury claim have nothing in common except the word “claim”. The fields open on an illustrative mid-size motor operation; overwrite them with your own. Rough figures are fine.
Two optional numbers, if you have them
Your numbers
What it adds up to
Four cards, one argument: what one claim costs your team, what that is a year, what the dashboard sees, and how much of the team works on failure demand. Change a number above and everything below moves.
1 · What one claim costs your team
Effort is a property of the claim, not of the queue. Six touchpoints on a 40-day claim is one a week; ten on a year-long claim is one every five weeks. Between them the file waits, and the customer, the repairer and the solicitor wait with it. LexisNexis 2024: after time to settle, the number of people and touches is the strongest driver of dissatisfaction.
2 · What that costs a year — two ways of counting
Two independent routes: your handler cost per productive hour, and ContactBabel’s UK cost per inbound call. If they land in the same range, the order of magnitude is right whatever you think of either assumption. Not all failure demand goes when the work is redesigned; in the case below, two-thirds did.
3 · What the dashboard sees — and what it doesn’t
Add the number your MI reports (optional field, left) and this card compares it with the journey you just described.
Task queues can all read green while a claim sits between them for months. A work-in-hand figure measures how long the team would take to empty its trays; the claim doesn’t live in the trays. FCA data won’t settle this for you: it publishes claims cost as a share of premium (motor 54%, home 46%, 2024), not days.
4 · How much of the team works on failure demand
Add your headcount (optional field, left) and this card puts the failure-demand hours next to the people who absorb them.
This is the number a board can act on. It says nothing about what happens to the capacity if the failure demand goes — that is the redesign question — only how much of what you pay for today is spent standing still.
How to read the numbers
Each card is one step in the same argument. None of them needs a model you cannot check by hand.
Effort lives in the claim, not in the queue
Weekly contact volumes look like a capacity problem. Touchpoints per claim look like a design problem. Same phone calls, different picture. The claim is the unit — open or closed, customer or repairer or solicitor, a touch is a touch and it costs the same eight minutes.
Between touchpoints, the claim waits
Divide the journey by the touchpoints and you get the average silence. That silence is what the customer experiences, what generates the chasing, and what no work-in-hand figure measures. Fewer touches in less time is what a well-designed claim looks like — not more touches, faster.
Failure demand is the share you can argue about
Nobody publishes an insurance-wide figure, so the slider is yours. What we know: one in five UK claimants had to chase, a fifth had to repeat themselves, and proactive contact cuts inbound questions by two-thirds. What the number does not decide is how much of it goes when the work is redesigned; that is worked out on your figures, when we talk.
What this page deliberately leaves out — each depends on inputs that are easy to misread from memory, so they are worked through together, on your real figures, when you bring me the problem.
- Where the touchpoints sitWhich of the ten are first-notification, which are the repairer, which are the same customer asking the same question. The redesign starts from that map, not from the total.
- Segment mixMarten damage and a total-loss third-party injury claim run on different clocks. This page takes one segment at a time; when we talk, they go side by side.
- What sits on topPhone-queue effects, Ombudsman case fees (£680 a case, 2026/27), renewal exposure, indemnity leakage on aged claims. Each pushes the figure up.
One of the world’s largest insurers. Alongside the headline figures: a 73% shorter payment lifecycle end to end, and no extra spend on tech, AI or headcount. Built on the Theory of Constraints and the ONE Thing Focusing Cycle. Case studies are illustrative, relate to specific circumstances and do not guarantee similar results.
What the public data can and cannot tell you
Well documented: what a contact costs (ContactBabel), how often UK claimants have to chase (Which?), how long a UK motor injury claim takes (Official Injury Claim portal, 378 days), US repair and property cycle times (J.D. Power). Not documented anywhere public: manual touchpoints per claim by line, UK motor-damage or home cycle time by peril, cost of handling per claim, first-time-resolution rates. Your figures on this page are, for now, the only ones in the room. Where a default here is a rule of thumb rather than a measurement, it says so.
Bring me the problem behind these numbers
We will spend 30 minutes looking at what is happening, what might be causing it and where I would start looking. No slides. No pitch.
If your backlog isn’t a design problem, you’ll be told that plainly.
Take the summary with you — as a PDF to your inbox, or straight to the printer.
Bring me your problem →The other half of the picture. This page prices the effort inside a claim. The Claims Backlog Scorecard diagnoses how it got there — fifteen questions about how claims actually move through your operation, a score out of 100 and your reading on each of the five levers behind it, so you can see which one to fix first. Under five minutes, free, and the score is yours either way.
Get my Low Effort Score →