Transparency can add profit and improve the customer experience by subtracting the stress and anxiety that creates a more expensive customer. Yesterday we looked at three key triggers of anxiety that are relevant to our industry, and how they can add to the stress and anxiety that home owners feel during the restoration process. Today I would like to look at how we can use transparency to combat these triggers.

iCAT Contents and iCAT in the Cloud users provide home owners and adjusters with ongoing transparency through web portals that are integral to the service that they provide. Home owners are able to log-in and stay involved with the restoration of their possessions. These portals tackle all three of the challenges of waiting that we referenced. Continue reading…

Yesterday I wrote about the anxiety of waiting in lines, and how it impacts the customer experience. Today I’m going to continue that thought, looking at three key points that David Maister wrote that I think resonate in our industry. I see them as situations that every one of our customers is challenged with.

1. Occupied Time Feels Shorter Than Unoccupied Time

In what is perhaps a sad commentary on my household, a day without a television is a minor inconvenience. Two days is a concern. Three days? Three days seems like an eternity. If you take away everything else we might use to fill our time, then three hours would quickly feel like three days. Continue reading…

In 2006 the Stern School of Business (NYU) published a paper exploring the value of transparency and the cost of complexity in relation to the accounting practices of business firms. While we cannot correlate their findings to our own industry, there is value in considering the questions that they asked. Today I’d like to focus specifically on one of those questions and the impact it might be having on your business, and the services you provide.

How do we reflect the transparency (or opacity) of a firm’s [operations] in its value?

After hundreds of conversations with contractors and dozens of conversations with adjusters, I’m not sure that we do. Words like transparency have crept into the dialogue of the industry in recent years, but clear understanding of the value of being able to comprehend and openly review a company’s operations remains uncommon. Continue reading…