One industry pro’s trying experience starting a claim

Canada’s insurance industry could use emerging technologies more effectively to give customers a ‘first notice of loss’ (FNOL) experience they’ve come to expect in other industries, attendees at KPMG’s 2025 Insurance Conference heard Tuesday.

Tom Reid, digital experience lead with the Insurance Brokers Association of Canada, shared his experience using technology to successfully handle a plumbing situation compared to waiting hours on the phone trying to start a hail claim.

Reid says he realizes companies cannot be staffed 24/7, but his FNOL experience with his insurer left much to be desired.

“Both companies…[are] super well aware that when a customer is calling them, they have a problem,” Reid says during a panel discussion on innovation and the adoption of emerging technologies. “They need that problem resolved as soon as humanly possible.

“And what’s different with these two stories is that that plumbing company made an investment in technology, updated the processes, so it makes me really stand out from the crowd…” Reid says. “On the other hand, my insurer, I was not quite as pleased with, and I instructed my broker to shop that policy.”

Reid’s insurance experience occurred during a massive hailstorm in Calgary last August. After the storm, at about 8:15 p.m. one night, he went outside to discover damage to his house and car. So, he called his insurer’s 1-800 line and got their automated phone system.

“So, it’s ‘press one for a car claim, press two for a property claim,’” Reid says. “Well, where’s three, both?”

Reid ended up using his own phone for the auto claim and his wife’s phone for the property claim. “And waited and waited…I heard their privacy policy…I could actually verbatim repeat the privacy policy by the time I was completely annoyed here.”

At about midnight, Reid hung up. He remembered his insurer had a FNOL form on their website — “essentially, it’s a ‘contact us’ form,” he said — so he entered his contact information. “Good news, the next day, I did get a call from the auto adjuster. About three days later…the property adjuster.”

Different experience

A couple of months later, Reid’s daughter-in-law discovered water under ceramic tiles in an ensuite bathroom. Reid used his insurance background to help determine the water was coming from the toilet, which was turned off.

CAIB New Edition 1.0 – a New Standard for Broker Education Image

Insights Paid Content

CAIB New Edition 1.0 – a New Standard for Broker Education

Preparing brokers to navigate an increasingly complex insurance landscape.

By 

Sponsor Image

At about 8:30 or 9 p.m. one night, he called the plumber, as his extended family is under his service contract.

“Much to my surprise, the phone was answered by an AI receptionist, which identified itself as AI,” Reid says. “It knew who I was already, because I had my phone number in the system, and it says, ‘Are you calling about this house or that house?’

“We actually talked back and forth and…[it] ascertained this wasn’t an emergency,” which would have been expensive, Reid says. “The AI said, ‘Hey, I’m going to take notes of this and leave a note for my human counterparts, and somebody will get back to you.’”

The plumbing shop opens at 8 a.m., and three minutes after opening, Reid got a phone call from somebody at the shop saying they received all the notes from the AI receptionist.

“‘So, we know exactly what’s going on. We have a plumber en route, and he’ll be there in 30 to 45 minutes,’” Reid says. “I was pretty blown away.”

While the insurance industry has come a long way, consumers still want automation and real-time service, Reid says. For example, utility services provide power outage maps and wealth management platforms provide 24/7 access and retirement calculators. “If a little 50-person plumbing company in Calgary can do it, so can we,” Reid says of Canada’s P&C industry.

Comparing buying decisions

“Consumers make hundreds — maybe thousands in some cases — of buying decisions every year,” he says. “One or two of those is an insurance transaction. So, their comparison is not insurance company A to insurance company B; it’s my insurance company or my potential insurance company, versus all the other decisions that I’m making today…”

Insurance and other highly regulated industries can have challenges innovating within their existing environments, acknowledges Karthik Ramakrishnan, CEO of Armilla AI. But as a startup, Armilla AI doesn’t have encumbrances of a large company, such as legacy systems.

“Large companies are very embarrassed to fail,” Ramakrishnan says. “They don’t want to put out a product that fails at the first factor.

“Do you know what the motto of a startup is? ‘If you are not embarrassed in the first version of a product, you did something wrong.’ That is how we approach it.”

Jason Contant

Jason has been an award-winning journalist with Canadian Underwriter for more than a decade, including the past three years as associate editor and, before that, as digital editor for seven years.