White Paper Predicts Drones as Next Big Thing in Insurance

Drones can provide a variety of benefits for property adjusters, according to a new white paper released by Cognizant last month. Specifically, insurers should consider drones in order to increase efficiency, reduce operational costs and improve customer service.

The paper, Drones: The Insurance Industry’s Next Game Changer, suggests insurers can capitalize on the use of drones because of their photo, video, data collection, sharing, and navigational capabilities.

The Future of Drone Use in the Insurance Industry

There are obvious benefits to using drones after a catastrophe – adjusters can avoid dangerous situations while still being able to investigate losses involving fire, flood, tornado and hurricane damage. In addition, drones can cover a large area in a short amount of time, reducing the amount of time an insurer’s mobile CAT unit would need to remain at the scene. This would reduce the operational stress of deploying several members of a claims department to a CAT scene.

According to the paper, drones can reduce the time it takes to conduct a risk assessment survey and settle a claim, thus improving customer experience.

Efficiency could increase up to 50 percent, according to Cognizant’s estimates, as the need for follow-up site visits is reduced due to the ability to combine dictated notes with photo and video collected by the drone.

Utilizing outside experts becomes easier since drones could transmit photos to defense attorneys, forensic engineers and inside claims staff.

Lastly, the white paper suggested the use of drones to combat fraudulent crop claims since drones could monitor weather conditions and measure crop losses more accurately.