Cincinnati Insurance Company Reduces Claims Processing Costs With Distributed Capture Solution

The Cincinnati Insurance Company (CIC) is a subsidiary of Cincinnati Financial Corporation and a leading provider of property casualty insurance. The group is the 25th largest writer of property and casualty insurance for businesses, homes and automobiles in the United States. Headquartered in Fairfield, Ohio – just north of Cincinnati - the company actively markets property and casualty insurance in 32 states, has approximately 2,800 employees at the corporate headquarters and more than 1,100 employees working across the nation from offices in their homes.

The Cincinnati Insurance Company's field claim representatives evaluate property and casualty insurance claims by visiting field locations to assess the damage and validity of each claim. The investigation process required a field claim representative to drive to the location of each claim, take pictures of the property damage with a 35 mm film camera and write notes and descriptions about the damage on a pad of paper.

At the end of the day, the representatives returned to their homes, where they would transpose their handwritten notes onto claim forms. Once or twice a week the claim representative would travel to a local store to drop photographic film off for development. To document the claim, the representative would tape developed photos to sheets of paper, package all the supplemental documentation, such as police reports, content statements and legal documents, then mail all the materials via priority mail to the corporate headquarters for processing. Once the shipments were received at headquarters, they were opened in the mail center and delivered to the imaging department, where the staff scanned them and entered them into the claims management system.

The Cincinnati Insurance Company wanted to improve the efficiency and lower the cost of moving this documentation into claim files. Mailing so many documents created significant postage costs for the company, and waiting for photos to be developed and shipments to arrive in the mail increased the amount of time it took to document claim files.