And with that, the 2022 season comes to an end! So much has evolved, developed, and grown at Brush this past year and while we experienced some growing pains, we were able to significantly scale our teams and strengthen our operations.

We introduced a lot of moving pieces when we added new roles and brought an entire development team in-house, which also introduced a lot of potential for error. But with that potential for error comes an incredible opportunity to learn and grow! Over the last year we were able to identify some operational holes that needed to be filled and were beyond blessed to close out 2022 by hiring and promoting some of the top talent in the industry.

This past year we focused on driving the customer experience, growing our claims operation (specifically Third Party Administration), expanding our recruiting efforts, continuing to enhance our technology, and strengthening our company culture.

In some areas we excelled, in others we experienced setbacks, but we were always able to identify opportunities to do better as an organization. We’ve learned to remain agile by reflecting, learning, and pivoting as needed to ensure our future remains bright!

So, what does 2023 look like for Brush?

World class customer experience

Last year we tested a dedicated customer experience team and experienced both wins and struggles. With nearly 20 team members at the peak of its operation, we saw some great benefits of immediate policyholder engagements and resolutions.

The customer-facing aspects of this program worked well: the interactions and speed of service provided to policyholders with inbound and outbound calls, emails, text, and chat messaging were a huge success!

But we noticed a breakdown in the internal interactions with hand offs of responsibilities and ownership of tasks. We also found that with the addition of the Customer Experience team, desk examiners and supervisors became lax with customer interactions, developing a “Customer Experience will handle it” mentality.

This was a serious opportunity for improvement. We knew that to be successful in delivering a completely positive customer experience, buy-in had to occur on every level and at every touch point of the claim. This was not just an implementation of a process, but a culture and mindset change.

This year, we will be focusing on that change and creating a deep understanding in each department of why and how their contribution drives the customer experience. We plan to achieve this with one-on-ones as well as regular “lunch and learn” sessions to cover de-escalation, communications, and anything else that can help us better serve our clients and their valued policyholders.

Compliance focused

As our team grows, so does our claims volume and geographic coverage areas which means we are more focused on compliance than ever. In addition to monitoring licensures and key performance indicators, we stay current with state governance and client specific focal points. To better manage and oversee these efforts, we have introduced our Organizational Development department. Within this branch, compliance and training will be the driving forces behind the success of 2023 and beyond.

The Hubvia ecosystem

This past year we moved our focus away from adding features to Hubvia to source an amazing in-house development team. They spent the year gaining a true understanding and working knowledge of the existing codebase and infrastructure and spent countless hours analyzing Hubvia. Through this analysis, we were able to eliminate bugs and workflow issues by a significant improvement in coding. This year we will continue to rebuild Hubvia to increase speed, fluidity, flexibility and customization in every module of the program.

We rounded out 2022 in announcement of our partnership with McKenzie Intelligence Service (MIS) to enhance the response to policyholders in communication and speed during catastrophe response. Further development of strategic ecosystem partnerships throughout this year will be a high priority to holistically round out a claims handling processes, efficiencies, and accuracy; further promoting the full claims solution to service policyholders across the US.

Our mantra for 2023 comes from a Roger von Oech quote: “It’s easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of what worked for you two years ago.”