I'll read the book later—show me my LOW EFFORT score now
A Customer Can Be Satisfied With Their Claim—and Still Decide to Leave
Claims ER reveals the hidden relationship between claims, customer effort and loyalty—and how a lower-effort experience can improve service while reducing operating cost. Get the complete digital book free.
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The Claim Was Settled. So Why Did the Customer Leave?
Most insurers judge a claim by asking whether it was settled correctly, quickly and satisfactorily.
The customer is making a different judgement.
How hard did you make me work?
Did I have to chase?
Did I have to repeat myself?
Did anyone take ownership?
Could I trust you when I needed you most?
A customer can receive the right outcome and still remember the experience as unnecessarily difficult.
The claim is closed.
The customer leaves months later.
And because those two events occur at different times, the organisation may never connect them.
Claims ER explains why.
Satisfaction Measures the Past. Loyalty Is About What the Customer Does Next.
A satisfaction score tells you how someone felt when you asked them.
Loyalty is revealed through behaviour:
Do they renew?
Do they buy again?
Do they consolidate more of their business with you?
Do they recommend you when nobody is prompting them?
Or do they quietly begin looking elsewhere?
Claims are unusually powerful moments in a customer relationship. They are when the organisation’s promises are finally tested.
Yet many claims journeys are designed primarily around internal functions, departmental responsibilities and task completion—not around the experience of the person trying to navigate them.
The result is unnecessary customer effort:
Chasing for updates
Repeating information
Crossing departmental boundaries
Deciphering unclear communications
Wondering what will happen next
Coordinating work the insurer should coordinate itself
Every additional piece of effort sends the customer a signal about whether the organisation is competent, trustworthy and deserving of their future loyalty.
The Strange Thing About Customer Effort
Reducing customer effort can sound like an expensive service improvement. Frequently, the opposite is true.
The same conditions that make a claim difficult for the customer also make it expensive for the insurer:
Customers chase because nothing appears to be moving.
Handlers respond to avoidable calls instead of progressing claims.
Work moves between teams and queues.
Information is requested repeatedly.
Delays create complaints and escalation.
The backlog generates more work, which creates further delay.
Customer frustration and operating cost are often two symptoms of the same design.
A lower-effort experience can be better for the customer and less expensive for the organisation.
What You’ll Discover Inside Claims ER
Why satisfied
customers still leave
Why satisfaction and NPS can disguise the true effect of a claims experience—and why future behaviour matters more.
How customer effort
affects trust and loyalty
The psychological signals customers take from chasing, repeating themselves, waiting and navigating organisational boundaries.
Why conventional claims
operations create avoidable work
How functional silos, task specialisation and fragmented measures make claims harder for customers and employees.
The hidden cost of
failure demand
How much capacity can be consumed responding to work the organisation unintentionally created for itself.
Why every measure can be green while customers wait
The “watermelon effect”—and how apparently successful departments can combine to create a failing end-to-end experience.
The Low Effort
Method
A practical approach for studying demand, identifying unnecessary effort and redesigning the claims journey around better flow.
How to test a different
design safely
How a controlled experiment can demonstrate what works before asking the wider organisation to change.
What You’ll Discover Inside Claims ER
This Is Not Merely a Theory
In one claims operation, the existing design had produced end-to-end times of approximately 500 days.
— The people weren’t lazy.
— They didn’t lack commitment.
— And the organisation didn’t need another motivational programme.
— The problem was the design of the work.
By changing the rules governing how claims moved through the operation—not adding headcount or introducing major new technology—the organisation reduced end-to-end time from approximately 500 days to 35.
— The same team.
— The same core technology.
— A fundamentally different experience for the customer.
— The result wasn’t achieved by making people work harder.
It came from removing the conditions that made customers and employees work unnecessarily hard in the first place.
Claims ER Is for You If…
You lead claims, operations, customer experience or transformation.
You want to understand what customers really remember about a claim.
You suspect satisfaction measures aren’t telling you the complete story.
You are accountable for loyalty, retention, service, cost or cycle time.
Your customers chase for updates or repeat information.
You believe the problem may be structural rather than motivational.
You want a practical way to investigate and redesign the experience.
It probably isn’t for you if you believe claims are simply transactions to process—or that the only answer is more people, tighter targets or another layer of technology.
about Stuart Corrigan - Best-selling Author & Entrepreneur
Stuart Corrigan writes about the strange psychology of customers and the companies that serve them.
He is the founder of Descartes Consulting, a specialist consultancy helping organisations design lower-effort customer experiences and service operations.
For more than 15 years, Stuart has worked with insurers, banks, housing organisations and public-sector services—combining systems thinking, operational design and the psychology of customer behaviour.
His work has helped organisations dramatically reduce end-to-end times, remove avoidable demand, improve productivity and create better experiences without simply adding people or technology.
Claims ER brings those lessons together to explain an overlooked commercial truth:
The experience of making a claim doesn’t merely determine whether the claim is settled. It helps determine whether the customer stays.
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Discover why customers forgive some companies but leave others—and why reducing customer effort may be one of the most effective ways to protect loyalty while improving operational performance.
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