Claim University

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Text, Insurance Journal. A building entrance with a sign that reads Claim University. Source: Travelers.

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PATRICK GEE: I'm Patrick Gee, responsible for auto and property claim operations, including catastrophe response at the travelers' this is our Claim University. It's a 200,000 square foot facility where we train almost 8,000 employees each year. About 300,000 hours of training that we conduct both virtually and also here at the University, and this in conjunction with our very comprehensive risk control forensics laboratory where we get to the root cause of claims and combine all that information. And we really train all of our employees so that technically they're prepared to help our customers recover
from loss as quickly as possible.

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A drone lifts off from the ground and flies around the top of a building.

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We actually developed our first drone training class several years ago in anticipation of the FAA rolling out their small drone guidelines, which they did this summer. So we actually only had to make a few small changes to the coursework we'd already developed, and it allowed our first class of students to basically cover the material.

Including all the very rigorous flight training and graduate within a week of the new guidelines being released over the course of the summer. Our drone training includes all the FAA regulatory rules so that we can pass the ground tests, and a very comprehensive set of flight training to pass our high standards for flight certification.

And we have those classes ongoing throughout the year. We have almost 150 drone operators trained at this point and will have several more trained by the end of the summer and more even beyond that. The drones have very high resolution imagery at a 4K or an 8K level. And so when you fly them over a property, you can take video for the whole flight and you can take still images throughout that flight, and then you can just upload that to your claim systems or wherever you're storing that imagery.

And right now we manually fly the drones, but we really expect, not too far down the road, that based on a lot of the new technology and entering the industry, drone flight will actually be automated. Including the taking of the photographs, the flight paths themselves, as well as uploading of all the information you need into your company's claim platforms.

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A table of drones.

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Using the drones is really another technology tool in the quiver of our claim professionals and we've really changed the way we do work over the past few years. With smartphones, with apps, with the geospatial tools we use to assess properties and measure things even before we go to the customer location. When you add to the drone technology in, it really creates a much safer environment that dramatically expedites the claim process in terms of our ability to pay our customers more quickly and help them recover from losses as soon as possible.

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Text, Insurance Journal TV.