The COO/Director of Claims says carriers need to shed year 2000 habits and communicate like it’s 2026.

Key Takeaways

• Ditch outdated channels: Relying on voicemail and snail mail creates friction; customers expect digital-first communication.
• Compress timelines from weeks to minutes: Digital signatures and real-time portals accelerate medical decisions and drastically reduce turnaround times.
• Integrate to drive adoption: Portals must live within existing workflows—forcing adjusters into separate systems guarantees failure.
• Centralize billing to reduce call volume: Transparent portals reduce billing confusion, which is a massive drain on organizational resources.
• Let user behavior dictate design: Launch with a baseline template and use real-time engagement data to refine features and content.

The insurance industry still operates on communication channels that disappeared from the rest of the world a decade ago. Voicemail. Snail mail. Even faxes. This means multi-week turnarounds on the most basic requests.

Beth Long manages claims operations for Waypoint Mutual, a workers’ compensation carrier processing thousands of injury claims annually. At April’s ReSource Pro Summit 2026 in Palm Springs, she sat on a panel titled “The Connected Insurer: Portals as the Hub of Policy, Claims, and Billing Operations.” She contended that the problem isn’t a lack of available technology or understanding. It’s that too many insurance companies simply haven’t broken out of old habits. So they’re continuing to ask customers to operate in a time period the world has left behind.

Digital claims transformation is the modernization of claims operations through technologies such as customer portals, digital document signing, integrated workflows, and real-time communication.

In an interview after the session, Long elaborated on what that shift means operationally.

Voicemail Is Dead

“Voicemail for our adjusters is pretty much history,” Long said during the panel. “No one leaves voicemails in their regular life. The idea that you would call an insurance company and leave a voicemail and just know that someone was going to promptly call you back is not really living in 2026.”

Workers’ comp claims involve injured employees, employers, medical providers, and adjusters, so problems happen when care and payments get tangled up in outdated communication channels. As Long pointed out, voicemail creates delays. Delays create friction. Friction creates mistrust. When customers can’t reach anyone, when responses take weeks, when basic requests get lost in voicemail trees, the claims process breaks down at the moments when it matters most.

Long’s reframe is simple: stop asking customers to use channels that don’t exist anywhere else in their lives. Waypoint’s portal uses texting, multi-language capability, and real-time notifications. When an employee needs to sign a document, they don’t mail it back. They don’t print it. They open a text, tap a link, and sign electronically.

From Weeks to Minutes

The operational impact is dramatic. “We no longer require snail mail,” Long said. “They’re electronically signing it. We’re getting it in a matter of minutes.”

In a typical scenario, Long described an injured worker who needs to authorize a medical records request. The old process involved printing a form, mailing it, waiting for return mail, and only then requesting records from the provider—a process that could stretch weeks.

“Most mail injured workers receive, they think is spam,” Long told The Insurance Lead. “They just throw it away. But now we just say, you’re going to notice you got a text on your phone, open that portal, go ahead and sign that. Five minutes later, I’m requesting 10 years worth of records.”

Five minutes instead of weeks. The efficiency gain is real, but the operational leverage is deeper. When records arrive faster, medical decisions accelerate. When medical decisions accelerate, treatment timelines compress. For an injured worker unable to work, that compression can make all the difference.

The Integration Problem

During the panel, Emily Cameron, head of Product and Customer Success at Crosstie, described the industry’s central process challenge as a matter of comfort: “No one wants to log into another system. Even if it would save them an hour of time. If they have to leave their workflow and click five buttons, they’re not going to do it. They’re just going to do it the old way.”

Long’s experience supports that view. As she outlined the changes Waypoint adopted, the company didn’t build a portal and hope adjusters would use it. The portal had to live where adjusters already work. They integrated the portal into their claims management system, their email, their entire workflow. The cost and complexity of integration is high. But the payoff is that adjusters and claimants actually use it.

Another panelist, Sarah Perry, SVP at Trean Insurance, discussed the need for simplicity from the MGA perspective. “The best ones are the simple ones, where you can log in, you can complete a task and you can move on with your day. Ease of use is what’s going to get you through.”

Why Billing Confusion Exhausts Organizations

Perry also pointed to an unexpected pain point: billing confusion as a top driver of call center volume. “It’s not just the IT team or the billing team that’s fatigued with answering those questions. It’s really the entire organization.”

A portal that transparently displays premium, billing dates, and payment status doesn’t eliminate all billing questions. But it reduces them, the panelists agreed. More importantly, it centralizes the conversation so that customers can reference specific line items, adjusters can respond in context, and records stay in one place.

Why Insurance Resists Change

Cameron’s observation about comfort levels cuts deeper than it first appears. It involves a steep level of risk-aversion.

“You could go to someone and say, ‘This solution will save you five hours a week, it will make people happier, it’ll make the experience better,’ and people still be like, ‘I don’t know. We do it this way and I don’t want to ruffle any feathers.'”

That resistance may sound irrational, but insurance involves regulatory compliance, audit trails, and liability exposure. Changing how claims are communicated, documented, and signed affects long chains, webs even, of careful monitoring.

So there’s a learning curve, and a matching implementation curve. When Waypoint built its portal, Long didn’t start with what she thought users should want. She started with a template from Crosstie, then let user behavior guide the refinements.

“That’s the nice thing about buying a product—you get a template to work with,” Long said. “And then we really use the engagement responses to say, ‘Do more over here.'”

What she learned surprised her. “I thought this was going to be the shiny part that everybody loved,” Long said, referring to a range of new features. “But only 25% of the people go there. I have 75% looking for information and reading. So we put more content out there. [I was surprised about] how much content we could deliver and how quickly we could get it back. That’s kind of the big hurdle in the claims arena: there is a huge lag time in getting information back or in from third parties that you need. And this all happened in real time for us.”

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Why is digital transformation necessary for insurance claims?

Digital transformation modernizes claims operations by replacing outdated communication methods like voicemail and snail mail with customer portals, digital document signing, and real-time communication. This eliminates multi-week turnarounds, reduces friction, and builds trust with customers who expect digital-first interactions.

How do digital signatures improve the claims process?

Digital signatures reduce document turnaround times from weeks to mere minutes. Instead of waiting for physical mail, claimants receive a text message, tap a link, and sign electronically. This allows adjusters to request necessary information, like medical records, almost instantly, which accelerates medical decisions and treatment timelines.

Why do insurance companies often resist adopting new technology?

The insurance industry is highly risk-averse due to strict regulatory compliance, audit trails, and liability exposure. Changing established processes for communicating and documenting claims affects careful monitoring systems, leading to a steep learning and implementation curve.

How can organizations ensure their staff actually uses new claims portals?

To drive adoption, portals must be integrated directly into the systems where adjusters already work, such as their claims management system and email. If employees have to log into a separate system or leave their primary workflow, they are much less likely to use the new technology.

What is a major driver of call center volume, and how can portals help?

Billing confusion is a top driver of call center volume, which exhausts the entire organization. A portal that transparently displays premiums, billing dates, and payment status helps reduce these inquiries and centralizes the conversation so adjusters and customers can reference specific line items in context.