How to Manage Roofing Insurance Claims in HubSpot

For those that are familiar with our insurance process, we handle typically everything inside of HubSpot and we've got different stages set up for the pipeline here. Inside of HubSpot, if the way that you sell something is different, then you should have a different pipeline. We typically have retail. Most roofers in residential are familiar with the retail process, and our stages in retail are a little bit slimmer than what they would be in insurance. There's less steps in retail. You would go to an appointment, make sure that the inspection was completed. You would send a contract, have the homeowner sign it, verify that the project was sold with the deposit and other information, and then go into your scheduling and production. In the insurance side, there's a little bit more to it on the front end. So we've got some added steps here on our insurance pipeline to take that into account here. So one of the steps that we have is claim filed, and that just allows us to know that we have a homeowner that actually does have a claim for their home, so they're eligible to stay in this pipeline. Typically, at this point, we'll have a question with the inspectors out on site. So in arrive, there's a question on the ARRIVE form that just asks the is there storm damage found? Yes or no? Or we'll talk to the homeowner and see, you know, where they're at with it. Sometimes you'll have a homeowner that understands that they don't have an insurance claim and you have others that are just, you know, they know that they have one because a storm just recently happened. But the claim filed is where we start. And here we'll have a task in Aribi or without a Rybie, you would just want your own task to schedule the adjuster appointment. Now your homeowner is going to do that, but they have the dates and those are what are really important for yourself, though your adjuster meeting scheduled and adjuster meeting complete. Dates are things that we want to know, so that way we can make sure that we're following up with the homeowner. What you want to do is if you're able to have someone go out on site with the adjuster, maybe help them point out some of the areas of concerns that you had or just for a relationship building. Some customers just choose not to and they'll just follow up with the homeowner after it's done. But that's still very important to make sure that you call within a few hours of the adjuster meeting happening, adjuster leaves the site site and then you call the homeowner and you just, you know, asking how did things go? Did they give you more information about next steps and those kind of things? What you want to do is make sure that you're the person and the roofer that they're talking to before they have a chance to talk to anyone else. Because if an adjuster meeting happens and you don't get a hold of them for four or five days, they're probably calling other roofers to see if they can get more estimates. So at some point we have this insurance estimate received and this is where the homeowner gets the paperwork from the insurance carrier to let them know what their claim is eligible for. So if they've got some repairs on the roof or siding or any of the other trades, or if it is a full replacement, this is where you'll have that information. And typically in HubSpot, that's where we begin the claims process. But in the claims object here, what this does is it's very similar to the building. We can keep track of what happened on that specific claim itself. And I don't have a set up in my demo here, but typically we have additional properties that would show up underneath here, just like you would for contacts where you can see here the company that this contact is with their email address and phone number. I typically have my claims object set up to show what the claim amount is, sometimes the profitability, the date of loss, or other important details that you might have that you would want to have readily available. Whenever we're working out of anything in HubSpot, we try to keep each object to be specific for its purpose. For instance, you have the building that is specific for the job site and you know that anything that happens at that job site is going to stay at that job site. If you replace a roof and the homeowner changes, that roof is still going to be at that building and we want to have record of that. And the same thing for the claim is we want to have track of what happened here. So in the claim here we have on the left hand side, just like any of the other objects, relevant data that's important to keep this one moving. At the top, I've got the stage that it's in. In our claim stages, they do vary from our deal stages. So there is an additional pipeline that comes into claims and it's a way for us to keep track of this separately. That way our sales guys and our deal activities continue to go forward while our claims team, even if it's the same group of people, they can still work on their activities and let the other team know what's going on without having to have too much going on on one object there. So inside of the claim we keep track of the date of super important. Depending on the carrier, they've got restrictions like after a year of date of loss, the claim is probably not going to be good anymore. Some carriers is two years. It just depends on the carrier and the state. The damage type is also important here as well. Depending on where you are, this helps you guys maximize the claim or just understand what it is that you're looking out for. The easy ones are wind and hail and then sometimes there's the no damage found. The insurance estimate. This is just a place for you to keep track of that file in a nice and easy place here on the left hand side and a property that we can easily reference. And then we go into the profitability. This is where we want to see how much the insurance carrier is going to pay and how much it's going to cost us to do the job. And with that we've got different types of profitability. So depending on how your organization is structured, sometimes we will keep track of the overall profitability of the claim and then sometimes we want it broken down by trade. So if we want to see what that roof profitability cost and the gutter profitability, we can have that separate. But a lot of times we have that grouped up into one to see what the overall profitability here is. There's also this profitability alert. This is just an emoji that is added by workflow that determines the color based on the profitability that we set for some of our customers. When it comes to insurance, we try to have a 50% profit margin just because you're typically going to have like a 10% increase on overhead than you would on retail. You've got more people working on this, got to do more follow up processes, just longer. It takes a little bit more paperwork from both the front and the back end there. So I like to have my retail profit profitability to be around 40% and then my insurance around 50%. So the way that I have this one set up here is anything under 40% is going to show red. Anything between 40 and then 45% is supposed to be yellow. And then 45 to 50% and above is going to be green. And so that just gives me a quick visual if I'm looking at this claim to know whether or not I can move forward with it, if it's green, then I've got a good idea that this is profitable and I could probably take the next steps. If it's red, I'm going to stop and probably look at some of the details, the estimated cost, insurance paperwork, to see what I can do to maximize this claim or let the homeowner know that there's going to be a little bit of an issue here with what we've got. We also keep track of what we call supplementing orders in the rounds of supplementing. And this is also really important, especially when you're doing any type of insurance work and the way the industry is running now, we want to keep track of how profitable these become. It also can tell you other metrics inside of your team of the reps that you have on staff that might be doing a little bit better about maximizing their claims and others that might need more assistance with theirs. So these supplementing orders are just anytime that you talk to the insurance carrier about getting a difference in the scope of work or the pricing on any of the line items. Some instances would be ice and water shield. I noticed that a lot with insurance carriers, they might not want to cover that at first. So if you look through the estimate, sometimes that will be a missing line item altogether. And in that case I would write up and let them know that we need to add in a line item for ice and water and price that based on whatever estimating tool we're using. In most cases we're using Xactimate, which is what a lot of the people in the industry are using as a standard. So they typically won't fight as much on the pricing when it's in there. What these do is that these will actually update. And as you add a supplementing order on the right hand side here, you'll just add in a name. And then in our demo, we have it set up to where I can separate these out. In our customer accounts, we typically will give you one of the options. So during the discovery of building your HubSpot, we'll like. We'll ask about how you guys want to separate out those trades. Some of the smaller roofers just getting started and into insurance want to have things combined, which makes it super easy. Or as you start to break down different trades, you might want to have those trades separated. Now with this, it does have manual input that you have to have. You're going to have to type in these amounts here that you'll get from usually Xactimate or whatever other estimating tool you're using with the Insurance carriers. But here we're just putting in the claim amount, how much that we're asking for at this point. In this case we've got our claim amount is 11,950 and we might be asking for 13,000. For the scope of work that needed to change, we'll add in our insurance estimate file which is in this case is going to be the Xactimate. I want to see the exact document that our team is sending to the carriers that allows us to, you know, better monitor them and then, you know, if there are any issues we might need to adjust our process and how we're sending those. So each company is very different in how they're sending their supplements. Sometimes we send them as emails and it's just a simple email to the carrier that says, hey, we've got, you know, this line item that just needs to be added. You approved 11,950. We're estimating that it's going to be 13,000. So that's pretty simple. We have others that use Xactimate and they'll write up their Xactimate quote to match what the insurance estimate looks like. And we usually have a little bit more success with that, but it does take a little bit longer. You have to have someone on staff that understands the Xactimate software. It does come with its own learning curve. But once you get to that point, you typically have better results there. And then from here you're going to choose the stage that's relevant to what we're doing here. And we've got sent to carrier, carrier approved or carrier denied. In almost all cases you're going to be going to the center carrier and then it's just going to confirm here the selections from above your all trades combined is what I'm doing instead of having them separated. My claim amount is 13,000 and then my price list date is also very important to have. So if you're using Xactimate or any of other industry software like that, they'll have a date on there that they got their price list from, what you can do later on and on the back end. So, you know, in roofing it might be a simple process where it's only a few months, but once you start getting into other trades like siding and gutters in Windows, it can be an easy eight month long process. And your price list today is going to look a little bit different from the time that you actually install and drop the materials. And it could be a six month difference between when I write this supplementing order versus when I drop the materials and I want to know that date because in the back end I can actually use that with the carriers and let them know like, hey, our priceless date is actually six months old. I'd like you guys to reprice this in the back end here and increase the claim that way a lot of times they will. So we'll choose the priceless date and then create the supplementing order. Now from here on the supplementing order, this is where it's going to be on you guys teams to follow up with this. And this would just be part of whatever follow up process you have with any supplementing order. Some carriers and some representatives you might want to follow up with daily, weekly, monthly, just depending on your relationship with them. But here we would just go into our tasks, we would create a task and then we would name it and then we would just set our activity date. So I want to just have this set for tomorrow at 2pm I can have that here to where I know that I need to follow up with the carrier. I would make my phone calls, send my emails, whatever it is that I need. If you guys have automation set up, there are workflows and sequences that we can enroll these supplementing orders in. So that way you can make sure that we're following a schedule to follow up with these carriers until they get us a response. But the follow up is going to be really important. And that's how we get this insurance claim from claim filed to sold a lot quicker is just making sure that we're on top of it with these carriers. And then of course you don't want to like bombard them with a bunch of emails. So figuring out that sweet spot with your sequences, sometimes again it's based on carrier and your relationship with them. You could have one sequence that's specific for carrier A and a separate one that's specific specific for carrier B. You know, one that does every day and one that does every other day to give it a little bit more of a breather there. And then in your supplementing orders at some point they are going to either approve or deny the claim and you would just move that supplementing order to the proper stage. So if it does get approved, we would just mark it as approved here and then upload the relevant information which would be the insurance estimate. When they do approve it, anytime they make an approval, they'll send you a new estimate and that's what you would just want to upload to make sure that your system is relevant in here. And then we also have a tab in the top that would just show you your overall profitability as well and your supplementing order history. So we'll keep it down here. Just the order that they came in from the first round of supplementing here. Our second round was up here. You can see the amounts that happened and the differences between them. So our claim amount, we started at 11,950. We are now asking for 13,000. Our price list dates and then the history of the insurance estimates and when those were created. So we can also track the amount of time it takes to run these estimates and these rounds. So as you're starting to build a team and you're considering bringing people in house, this is a great way to track their efficiency with the claims process altogether.