Relationships can make or break return to work. We often stress the significance of the supervisor / employee relationship for injury management, however, this is not the only relationship that matters: senior management, co-workers and RTW coordinators also influence the speed and durability with which injured or ill workers get back on the job. While insurers don’t have the same kind of in-the-workplace sway, their relationship with claimants has an impact on return to work outcomes and on the long term costs of claims. We delve again into the latest RTW Monitor (the annual report put out by the Heads of Workers' Compensation Authorities Australia & New Zealand) to find out whether Australia’s injured workers are satisfied with the services provided by insurers and, perhaps more importantly, what factors determine their level of satisfaction.

Nationally, contact between injured workers and insurers is on the increase. At the time of the 07/08 RTW Monitor survey, 45% of injured Australian workers had had contact with their insurer within the previous three months, whereas in 97/98 this rate was around 37%. Two jurisdictions showed significantly less contact than the others – only 30% of injured Tasmanian workers had had contact with their insurer in the three months prior to the survey, while just 19% of injured Seacare workers had. At 54%, South Australia had the highest rate of contact, followed by Comcare at 52%.

There is no reason to assume, however, that more contact equals a higher level of satisfaction amongst injured workers. The South Australian workers’ comp system is often held to be the worst performing of all the states’: having the highest level of contact between claimants and insurers hasn’t changed that perception.

Injured workers were also asked to rate a number of aspects relating to how their insurer handled their claim along a scale of one to five, where one was “poor” and five was “excellent”. The researchers then expressed this as a rating out of five. Specifically, workers were asked about their insurer’s:

• Attitude to the claim (3.7/5);
• Responsiveness to enquiries (3.8/5);
• Provision of accurate information (3.7/5);
• Helpfulness (3.7/5);
• Understanding of their situation (3.6/5);
• Communication with the worker (3.6/5);
• Advice about the claim (3.5/5); and
• Advice about rights (3.5/5).

New Zealand outperformed Australia in each of these customer service categories, receiving an average customer service rating of 3.9/5 while Australia sat on about 3.6/5. Nevertheless, Aussie workers’ perceptions of insurer services have been improving steadily over the 11 years of the RTW Monitor reports, up from the 97/98 level of 3.1/5.

Within Australia, average customer service performance varied from jurisdiction to jurisdiction in the 07/08 period. Queensland’s rating (3.9/5) was just as good as New Zealand’s but Victoria (3.4/5), South Australia (3.5/5) and the Northern Territory (3.4/5) rated less well.

The 07/08 RTW Monitor also included a new question about claimant’s level of satisfaction with the overall way in which their claim was handled. This enabled the researchers to develop a hierarchical customer satisfaction model for the relationship between claim handling and claimant satisfaction, where Impact (or “I”) = 0 would mean no relationship and I = 1 would mean complete predictability.

According to this hierarchical model, customer satisfaction has four main drivers. In descending order of importance these are:

• The insurer’s attitude to the claim (I = 0.32);
• The insurer’s helpfulness (I = 0.28); and, less significant but still of influence
• The insurer’s understanding of the situation (I = 0.19); and
• The worker’s satisfaction with the claim handling process (I = 0.18).

The RTW Monitor asserts that the greatest gains to claimant satisfaction will be achieved by improved performance in terms of the attitude of the insurer to the claim and to a lesser extent their helpfulness.   

In order to see how these customer service drivers might play out in practice, let’s take a quick look at how they’re utilised in the Sunshine State, which remains Australia’s star performer in terms of customer service and workers’ comp. In 2006, Ian Brusasco, the chairman of WorkCover Queensland, attributed some of the turn-around in performance of his state’s workers’ comp system to ‘…a company-wide commitment to customer service’.

This commitment comprised a less adversarial approach to claims handling, as well as an emphasis on training and retaining staff, employing a permanent rather than casual workforce, devoting resources to keeping staff happy and healthy, and conducting extensive customer service satisfaction research.

Queensland is the only state in which all claims are managed in-house and it seems as though its centralised, customer-focused approach pays dividends.  Not only does WorkCover Queensland have the lowest proportion of long-term claims in Australia, it also has the lowest average premium rate and has seen a significant drop in the number of common law claims since the state’s workers’ comp system was reformed.

You can read the RTW Monitor online here.

And read more of Ian Brusasco's comments on WorkCover Queensland .