Paul Wozencroft, MD for Property Assurance, reflects back on 2019 and gives a taste of what’s to come from CET Property Assurance in the year ahead:

A year of growth for Home Emergency

“2019 was another year of accelerated growth for CET, especially on our Home Emergency division. Our aim is to become the best outsourced Home Emergency business in the industry, both in terms of customer service and our technology. We grew our volume by 20% last year, welcoming on board new clients and their customers.

“Our greatest strength is that we make the complexity of a claim simple, connecting the many to the many; thousands of customers to our national network of thousands of engineers. One of the ways we’ve been able to do this is by investing in our technology; SIMPLIFi.

“Those of you that have worked with CET for many years will know that we’ve always looked for new and innovative ways to connect everyone within the claims journey. SIMPLIFi is helping us do exactly that – deliver a better claims journey for every customer, supplier, engineer and client that works with CET.

“Now that SIMPLIFi has been rolled out across our Home Emergency division, we can continuously improve the customer journey and find new ways of improving the experience. SIMPLIFi gives us rich data insight, enabling us to deliver a service that is in line with the expectations of the modern consumer. AI technology and voice assistance is at the forefront of our latest developments, making our service smarter and more accessible to customers. With the success of SIMPLIFi in Home Emergency, we’ll also be looking to roll-out tailored solutions in our Subsidence and Drainage divisions over the course of 2020."

Surge in Subsidence

“In our Subsidence division, the continuing surge meant that we saw a 120% increase in volume. We pride ourselves on being able to deliver a great quality service during surge periods, calling on resources across the CET Group to ensure that customers’ and clients’ needs are met. Our Subsidence team worked closely with the loss adjusters during the surge period, as well as with our CET Infrastructure colleagues to ensure that we had the internal resource to dedicate to fulfilling the needs of the customer.

“Our video survey technology was a great helper during the surge, enabling us to collect video data from site. From this data, loss adjusters were able to make decisions from their desks rather than by visiting sites, reducing elapsed time. We’re really pleased with the results that we had from using this and with the effort from our subsidence team in Billericay to ensure our customers were happy.

“We also had a strong year in our Underground Services division, who continued to work closely with our Subs teams to provide a total underground experience for loss adjusters. There’s a lot of exciting projects coming up over the course of 2020 for both our Subsidence and Underground Services divisions that will help to transform the way we work with our partners.”

What’s in store in 2020?

“Looking to the year ahead, we’ve committed to further develop SIMPLIFi for our Drainage and Subsidence divisions, tailoring the solutions to the propositions that we offer. Bringing SIMPLIFi into these areas of the business will bring greater visibility of the end-to-end process, as well as better MI for our industry partners.

“We will also continue to develop SIMPLIFi in our Home Emergency division, exploring how intent learning can enhance the customer journey. One of the ways that we’re currently doing this is by implementing AI learning with the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) when customer call about an existing claim. By using phrase recognition, we’ll be able to route the caller to the appropriate incident manager, as well as tailor the service they require.

“We’ll also be looking into new ways to help the customer once their home emergency is over, with opportunities to manage building claims emanating from home emergency claims, to provide a one-stop experience.

“Thank you all for your support last year and I look forward to working closely with you in the next as CET continues on its growth journey.”