Effective Writing for Claims Professionals helps improve the organization, wording, persuasiveness, tone, and format of documents written by claims (property/casualty, life/health, workers' compensation), underwriting, and loss control professionals. This intimate one-day workshop helps build participants' skills and confidence by reviewing actual insurance documents, participating in exercises, and exploring topics such as getting started, organizing information, and polishing tone and persuasiveness. All participants are given access to our Writing Hotline for one year and to our fax and e-mail services for one month following the course.
Objectives:
- Improve the organization of claims, underwriting, and loss control correspondence.
- Learn to write short, clear, friendly letters to the insureds.
- Overcome claims writer's block, vagueness, and the stress of getting started.
- Improve the phrasing, format, and tone of each message.
- Gain an assertive style that avoids hedging and being pushy.
- Develop skills to help emphasize the benefits of recommendations to the insured.
- Eliminate jargon, clichés, redundancy, wordiness and antiquated phrases.
- Eliminate lengthy sentences and paragraphs.
- Survey useful rules of punctuation, grammar, capitalization, and spelling
- Learn methods to make writing visually appealing.
- Discover how to convey negative news diplomatically.
- Sharpen the writing of reservation-of-rights letters and denial letters as well as letters to physicians, insureds, opposing attorneys, commissioners, agents, and vendors.
Methodology: For many insurance professionals, writing is anxiety provoking. This workshop removes the anxiety by establishing a constructive atmosphere of fellowship and humor. The review of writing samples gives participants actual case histories, and points out do's and don'ts of writing. There are many handout materials that supplement the writing samples, and there are group exercises to help reinforce the skills.
Pre-Course Assignment: Two weeks before the day of the workshop, participants are asked to submit several samples of their writing and to fill out "The Claims Writing Audit," a short questionnaire that pinpoints individual writing problems. Writing samples and Audits help shape the course to fit each participant's needs.
Length: One Day
Recommended Number of Participants: 6-20
Text: The Elements of Business Writing (Macmillan, 1993) by Gary Blake and Robert W. Bly
This seminar can be customized to the following areas: Property/Casualty, Life/Health, Workers' Compensation, Catastrophe, SIU, Marine, Malpractice, Auto, or Liability.