Let’s be honest: the shared claims inbox wasn’t supposed to be permanent.
It started as a practical workaround, a holding pen for the emails, documents, and vendor communications that legacy claims systems weren’t built to handle. One shared inbox where everything lands until someone sorts it out. Simple enough at lower volumes.
But somewhere along the way, that temporary fix became the standard operating model. And it’s quietly killing adjusters’ productivity.
How the Shared Claims Inbox Became the Default
Early claims systems were built to log activity, not interpret it. When intake volumes were manageable, an experienced adjuster could scan the inbox queue, spot what mattered, and keep things moving.
At lower volumes, this worked. Then came the avalanche: multi-channel communications, digital photos, vendor portals, customer self-service. Everything was still funneling into that same general queue, now competing for attention in an undifferentiated mass.
The Hidden Cost: A Tax on Your Claims Adjusters
Here’s what actually happens in your operation:
Junior adjusters spend their mornings playing email detective, trying to figure out what’s urgent, what’s routine, and what claim half these messages even belong to. They’re making judgment calls with incomplete context, which means misrouting and rework.
Your senior adjusters – the ones who should be closing complex files – are instead validating intake decisions, fixing routing errors, and handling escalations that shouldn’t have escalated in the first place.
The result is: Extra handoffs, repeated reviews, and delayed decisions. Every misrouted email adds days to cycle time. Every urgent item that sits unnoticed adds claims cost.
And your best people? They’re burning out on inbox management.
Shared Inboxes Don’t Prioritize Claims. They Just Pile Up
A general queue organized by arrival time tells you when something showed up. It doesn’t tell you:
- Which claims involve injury or high severity
- Where litigation risk is emerging
- Which customers are vulnerable or escalating
- What’s approaching a regulatory deadline
All those signals are buried in unstructured text. By the time someone manually flags them, you’re already behind.
Why Rules and Sub-Queues Don’t Solve This
Many organizations attempt to improve their shared inbox by layering rules on top of them. Priority flags, sub-queues, and routing logic are added to regain control.
It helps temporarily, then claims patterns shift, expectations multiply, and you’re back to manual sorting – just with more complicated workflows.
The backlog remains. Adjusters are still responsible for making sense of it.
What Actually Works: AI Agents Do Claims Sorting Better and Faster
The answer is not a better inbox. It’s removing the shared inbox from the center of the process.
Modern AI can read and understand claims communications as they arrive. It can:
- Classify intent and urgency based on content
- Match communications to the correct claim automatically
- Evaluate what requires immediate action based on your procedures
- Route to the right adjuster with full context
With these AI tools, routine items are handled automatically and critical updates surfaced immediately.
Any Claims Organization Can Kill the Adjuster Tax
The technology exists today to eliminate the shared inbox tax. Your best adjusters shouldn’t be sorting emails. They should be settling claims.
Five Sigma’s Clive is the industry’s first Multi-Agent Claim Expert. Clive adds AI and automation to any existing system to automate routine tasks, dynamically plan claim handling, and advance the claim automatically according to the insurer’s operating procedure.
Clive reads and classifies incoming claim emails and attachments, links them to the correct claim, and determines what requires action based on live claim context, saving valuable adjuster time.
In a recent case study with INSHUR UK, Clive reduced claim-related email handling time by 60% and cut overall general queue handling time by 33%, with unmatched precision.
The general queue was never meant to be permanent. It’s time to kill it.
