Meet Branch’s AI claims agent: cAItlin

Claims are what your insurance company signs up to do, but it’s still one of the industry’s weaknesses—data from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) showed that 62.5% of all insurance complaints were about claims handling issues. It shouldn’t be this way. So Branch built a better claims process, starting with an innovative first notice of loss (FNOL) system available 24/7, 365 days a year, with zero hold times.



Meet cAItlin: An AI agent

Branch worked with Liberate to build cAItlin, an empathetic AI agent who handles claim filing quickly and with higher data integrity than call centers or electronic FNOL systems. This is more efficient, of course, but more importantly it frees up our five-star rated claims team to do what they do best: handling and closing claims. This also means a quicker, smoother process for our members—the average call time with cAItlin is three minutes and 22 seconds.



Building a better experience

As a startup, Branch has a small but nimble team, and we began with claims processes fully outsourced to third parties. Eventually we built an in-house claims team we’re incredibly proud of, but even then, we left our claims filing to a third party—as an incredibly administrative step in claims, it was a needed trade-off so our claims team could focus on the claims themselves.

However, this had huge limitations—logistically, that these third parties are not integrated into our claims system, and the data they were collecting wasn’t always reliable because of human error, which our claims team would then have to spend time correcting. But more importantly, we didn’t have control over the member experience, and empathy through the entire claims process is incredibly important to Branch.

In fact, this was a primary concern as we started to look at digital or AI options for our claims intake process—could AI be empathetic? Chief claims officer Charlie Wendland was surprised by the answer.

“We found that cAItlin was not only empathetic—her tone would shift when she sensed answers that required some level of empathy—but she would also issue empathetic statements when she sensed something that deserved empathy,” he explained, “that was huge.”

With this confidence, Branch moved forward with Liberate to build a white-labeled FNOL experience that was fully integrated into our own claims system. And the results have been significant.



What members can expect with cAItlin

Because of cAItlin’s seamless integration, members don’t have to key in all their policy information or answer redundant questions—cAItlin syncs to their account information. So the questions asked are more precise, takes less member time, and collect better data. 

“It gets the claim off on the right foot,” Charlie said, “which in turn leads to a much smoother experience for our members.” But perhaps the biggest impact for members? cAItlin is always available, with no hold times. Regardless of call volume, she picks up—on average, in less than a second. 

And it’s proving successful: ~85% of Branch claims now go through cAItlin.

Even so, Branch is aware of certain hesitations people have about using AI, which is why it’s important for us to be straightforward about that experience and still provide human and digital options: “We don’t try to fool anybody,” Charlie said, “she comes right out and says, ‘hey, I’m an AI, this is going to be a great experience but I understand if you don’t want to talk to me.’”

“There’s a lot more flexibility with cAItlin to meet customers where they’re at,” Charlie said of Branch’s vision for claims, “but because we have more control over the experience, our adjusters are in a much better place when claims are filed through cAItlin. It makes for an overall better experience.”



Expanding innovation

In addition to FNOL, cAItlin can also handle about 56% of member support calls about claims—a function Branch has been first to implement. Simple questions like, “who’s my representative?” and “what’s my claim number?” can now be fielded by cAItlin, which creates more capacity for our claims team to do what only they can do: have our members’ backs, and complete their claims. 

Another innovative function of cAItlin: mitigating bigger losses in certain homeowners’ claims. If there’s a claim that requires water mitigation services and that information is relayed in the intake process, those services are automatically dispatched without human intervention to ensure we can protect our member’s home as much and as quickly as possible.

And this is only the beginning. Branch continues to tweak and iterate with cAItlin to expand capabilities and ultimately build the best possible member experience. Because of cAItlin, our claims team now starts a couple steps ahead. 

Charlie celebrated, “they have to spend less time cleaning up information that was wrongly inputted, and they have to ask less questions on the first call to that member because we have richer data now from when the claim was reported.”

This is the future of insurance, and Branch is proud to be leading the way.