Josh Ehmke

Welcome back to another OCS Podcast. I’m Josh Ehmke, Co-founder and General Counsel to One Claim Solution, and we’re back again today to talk a little bit more about specifically OCS and our processes on how we do things. We’re going to look a little bit more under the hood about our people, the different processes that we use, and some of the technology that we use that’s specific to us, and how we use that in order to get better outcomes for our customers.

So with that, we do get multiple questions on the regular about a few different things. So we’ll jump right into some of the questions.

A lot of the the questions that we get here at OCS are about our people and about the processes that we that we kind of use. In the beginning days of OCS, we were very people-heavy, and we were developing the technology and softwares that we used to help streamline everything that we did, and over time, we’ve been able to perfect those processes and implement those based on different things that we’ve seen in the industry. But like I said at the beginning, we’re still we were very people-heavy. We still are pretty people-heavy. There’s only so much that technology can do, and so we pride ourselves on the people that we do have here. And the technology is just used to be able to supplement and assist our people and help streamline and make them more efficient in what they’re doing on their day-to-day tasks. So it’s definitely something that’s constantly evolving here at OCS and will always evolve. As everybody knows in the industry, things are constantly changing. So we do pride ourselves and try to take great ownership and care in the relationships that we try to establish with different carriers and different adjusters, specifically. But it’s definitely something that’s constantly moving, molding, changing, and we try to find ways that we can through feedback from our people here as they are on the front lines, we try to take that feedback into consideration and be able to come up with creative ways to implement that feedback into different things–whether it’s technologies, whether it’s adapting different types of progress in the AI realm–these types of things. And so definitely love the feedback that we get from our people that are literally on the front lines every day dealing with thousands of these claims. And so it’s invaluable feedback and information that we get.

And so I guess, to summarize it, we have, you know, basically three different things that we’re looking at as to how OCS does what we do. We’ve got our people, which, again, we were very people-heavy at the beginning. Then, we’ve got our processes. Processes are invaluable. And then you’ve got the technology aspect of it. And so when you can have all three of those things working together to accomplish the same goal, it’s fantastic. You have the right people in place, and our people, as good as they are, are still only as good as our processes. And processes for any business are meant to be followed and and so as we continue to develop the technology and build out that technology, really with an emphasis on focusing on how to streamline those processes, or ensure that our people are following the right processes, making it very easy for them to do it really creates a sense of a situation of efficiency for our people. It empowers them to help them feel like they’ve got what they need in order to be successful, for our contractors as well. So the three of them really do work hand in hand. People being extremely important processes, being there to help drive and help our help our people feel empowered to be able to accomplish their goals, and the technology aspect of it helping make those processes easier to follow on the daily. So pretty excited about the growth.

It’s interesting to sit back and look at OCS from 2016 to where it is today, you know, eight, nine years later. And it’s fun to sit back and look at that and see how it’s grown, how it’s improved, how we’ve created just such crazy amounts of efficiencies in our processes. It’s pretty incredible 

When we’re thinking about the people here at OCS, and the personal touch that our people are able to bring to it a lot of times, doesn’t really matter how good your processes are or what type of technology you have implemented in order to help drive those processes, there’s still a personal touch that the human experience can bring into the claims processing, into the claims processing for our customers.

And so, everyone’s been on that phone call, right, where you’re talking to the automated operator, and it’s so frustrating, or, as AI continues to develop, there’s still different things that AI doesn’t get right, or it doesn’t bring that personal touch to what it is you’re trying to research or you’re trying to create. It’s getting there, but it still doesn’t quite fill that human void.

And so one of the things that we focus very heavily on here at OCS is that our people have the right skills, the right personality, the right ability to be able to connect with the adjusters on the back end in order to help streamline that claims process. It’s not always just about having the right information in front of the adjuster on a timely basis. There’s also a personal touch that still is needed a lot of times. And so as great as technology is, as great as tech, as processes can be, there still needs to be that personal touch through the process, because that’s still on the other end as well. And so as we train our people and develop them, it’s important that we don’t lose focus on everything that technology and processes can do, that there’s still this personal touch aspect to the claims process as well.

So while we have the people part that can’t be replaced, you also have the processes part and and that is different from the people and technology as well, because your processes are only as good as it does link back to people, because your processes are only good as as your people and how they use those processes and follow the processes. So these processes are also developed over time. When something breaks, it’s important to figure out why it breaks and be able to put the fix or the solve into that to prevent that from happening again, even though the people aspect of everything is super important, and it’s important that our people are trained and developed correctly, people are still people, and there are still times when people make mistakes, as we all know. We’re all living this human experience the same way, and nobody’s perfect. And so you develop these processes in order to help enable the human aspect of the entire claims process to make it so that the errors happen less frequently, and that we actually do implement the wisdom that we might gain from a mistake to make sure that that mistake doesn’t happen again. And so processes are very important as well in order to drive efficiency and help us meet our key performance indicators, to make sure that we’re performing correctly and meeting the expectations of our contractors.

So the third part of that is technology, right? And as you you start to develop people, and you develop the processes to enable the people, it helps to be able to develop the technology surrounding both of those in order to drive the efficiencies and make it so that, you know, I don’t want to say idiot proof or foolproof, but it does make it a lot more mistake proof when you have technology driving a lot of the things that that our claims advocates are doing.

And so it’s interesting how each of the three: the people, the processes, and technology, are different, but at the same time they’re all connected. And when they’re used at the same time appropriately, it’s pretty amazing to see what can happen and the efficiencies that we’re able to gain in our performance for our contractors.

So in summary, we’ve got the three right, the people, the processes and the technology. And we didn’t get super deep into the specifics of how each one of those works, and OCS uses each one of those just more so that it’s important that our contractors understand that all three exist, that we use all three in order to drive efficiencies for our contractors.