As one of the largest providers of motor accident management services in Australia, AAMC offers services that are essential to the daily lives of people across the country. AAMC’s 5-Star Technology award in 2022 proves that innovation has had a positive impact on the company’s efficiency. In this interview, AAMC’s sales and strategic relationship manager, Daniel Lukich, talks about how technology has improved the services provided to customers, including insurance underwriters, car rental firms, and corporate fleets.
An important aspect of AAMC’s operations, said Lukich, is providing a cohesive repair management solution “which includes taking care of the client, appointing repairers, managing the customer throughout the repair process, arranging a hired car if need be”.
Among the many businesses in its segment of the insurance market, AAMC stands out due to its size, which enables the company to provide end-to-end coverage across all types of motor vehicles nationwide.
Technology is key to how the company improves efficiencies and the customer experience, and will become even more important in the future, he said. Specifically, innovation can speed up the repair process and the claim lifecycle, thus reducing the time that customers spend on phone calls to find out the status of their claims. Technology can also play a bigger role in gathering accident evidence and identifying potential losses.
For AAMC, digital technology facilitated the shift to a work-from-home arrangement prompted by the pandemic.
“We had to rely on digital technology to get the evidence through to our assessors so that they can do things more from the desk,” Lukich said. “Because on-site appointments were very limited, [the] technology that we had within our organisation enabled us to pivot quickly and [provide] services to our clients quite well. And in fact, it gave us a lot of learnings on how to do things smarter going forward.”
Despite this, Lukich believes that the human element cannot be completely removed from the claims process, and human intervention – for example, involving a skilled claims handler – is still needed in complex cases.
More important than tech progress, as Lukich has observed over the past 20 years, is the change in consumer expectations as a result of “being able to instantly get a purchase or a service”. However, this kind of feature is lacking in the insurance claims process. He said that insurers will have to go through a paradigm shift to reduce the constraints in their legacy technology, which is characterised by “step-by-step linear claims”.
