Email-driven case management for insurance brokers

It is 8:40 on a Monday. The shared claims inbox holds thirty-four unread mails, and nothing on screen says which one matters most. One of them quotes a claim reference that already has an open file. By the time it reaches the person who owns that file it has been forwarded three times, and a second colleague has already answered the client.

This scene is an illustration. The numbers sit close to what a claims team at a Belgian broker with several offices described to us: thirty-odd mails in the general mailbox on a Monday morning, and three or four internal forwards before a mail reaches the right handler.

Microsoft’s 2023 Work Trend Index, a survey of 31,000 people in 31 countries, found that emails, meetings and chat take up 57 percent of the average working day, which leaves 43 percent for creating. Those are office workers in general. Nobody measures a claims inbox separately, and much of the time in one goes into finding out what a mail belongs to before anyone can act on it.

Where a claim leaks when it lives in email

Broker teams describe the same four leaks, each in their own words.

Nobody owns the mail. Forwarding is how ownership gets assigned in a shared inbox. The inbox records that a message arrived and says nothing about who picked it up, so the first handler to open it either acts or forwards it, and the sender cannot tell which. Read what email ping-pong costs a team for the longer version.

The same claim exists twice. The motor team at an international broker told us that their Outlook-based ticketing opens a separate ticket each time a client repeats an email, and that nobody can follow who did what. A client who writes twice gets two files.

Documents scatter. A claims team at a Belgian broker described insurer acknowledgements piling up in the claim file. Company letters and VAT forms stay inside the email, because nobody takes them out and files them as documents. Insurance document automation for brokers looks at that problem on its own.

The broker system lags behind the inbox. A claims contact at a Flemish broker explained the routine: the team creates the claim file in the broker system by hand and links each mail to it themselves, through the connection between Outlook and that system. Every step is correct, and every step is manual.

A case holds the work around the mail

An inbox holds messages. A case holds the work: the contacts involved, the data collected so far, the documents, the steps that have been taken, a status and a timeline of everything that happened.

Two details make the difference in daily use. A case has a status that moves from open to resolved, and it can say whose turn it is. In Penbox this is a “waiting for” marker that shows whether the next move belongs to the owner or to the contact. A handler who opens the case sees where the claim stands without reading the thread from the top. Clients ask for the same visibility: Deloitte Belgium’s Digital Insurance Maturity 2025 report advises insurers to focus on online servicing, because customers want to manage their contracts and track their claims online.

The second detail is where the case sits next to the tools a broker already uses. For Belgian brokers that means the broker management system, so the case has to push mails and documents there as the claim moves, and not only at the end. One of the brokers we spoke to asked for exactly this: when a client phones and the mail is not yet in the system, the handler has nothing to look at. For a longer look at the idea, read the case that understands itself.

Four habits that keep a file from leaking

These work in any tool, including a well-run shared inbox.

1. One owner at any moment, visible to everyone. If the owner changes, the change is written down where the whole team can see it.

2. One file per claim, even when five emails mention it. A repeated email joins the existing file.

3. Every mail and document sits in the file and in the broker system. Nothing lives only in a personal folder.

4. A status that says whose move it is. The next step has an owner, and the file shows when it is waiting for the client.

Before you change a process, spend a week reading the mailbox. For each mail, note which file it belongs to, who touched it and how many times it was forwarded. That pattern shows where a claim leaks faster than a flowchart does.

What the inbox costs in hours

Every forward, every re-read and every “which file is this?” interrupts the person doing the work. In the same Work Trend Index, 68 percent of respondents said they do not have enough uninterrupted time to focus on the work they are paid to do. That is a general office survey, and claims handlers were not singled out. It matches what they describe on Monday mornings.

The calculator below turns that into hours for your own team. The defaults are an illustration, so change every number to match your inbox.

Starting the case from the mail

This is where an email-driven setup helps. Penbox starts from the mail instead of asking the team to open another tool first.

A handler can create a case from the Outlook add-in, blank or from a template, and add a mail to an existing case. A forwarded email or a follow-up that quotes a claim reference joins the existing case instead of opening a second one. Cases created from a shared mailbox can be assigned to the right colleague. When the agent is unsure which vehicle, contract or guarantee a mail refers to, it asks the team one question through a task, and any message it writes is a draft that a person sends. The FNOL process for insurance brokers shows the same idea at intake.

For brokers who work with BRIO, mails and documents can be pushed to the claim as the case moves. The platform is built to be connected: Portima’s CEO told KPMG Belgium that Portima publishes APIs so the market can build solutions that connect to BRIO.

This follows what McKinsey describes for claims: simple claims can run straight through, and even in 2030 the most complex claims will still be handled by humans. The question for an operations lead is where the line sits in their own portfolio, and who handles the cases on the human side of it.

There is a trade-off. Matching a mail to an existing file can go wrong. One broker team saw emails attached to the wrong case after a match that was too quick, and the fix was to tighten the rule. Someone has to be able to see why a mail landed where it did and move it, and no email should disappear from the mailbox in the process. The same team turned down plain “we received your mail” auto-replies because they add nothing, and wanted to avoid replies that name a handler, because of absences and handler changes.

Who could pick this up tomorrow?

If a colleague left tomorrow, could someone else tell, from the system alone, what each open file is waiting for? If the answer needs a conversation, the knowledge sits in people and not in the file.

Read more about what case management means in practice, how Email Intelligence reads incoming mail, and what insurance brokers use it for.