When insurance customers call to file a claim after a car crash or natural disaster, they expect answers—not a dropped call or buggy application. But IT performance issues can quietly undermine critical moments in the claims journey and put customer loyalty at risk.

Consider that today’s claims experience often involves a variety of touchpoints spanning emails, contact centers, cloud-hosted apps, video uploads and mobile portals—all of which depend on seamless network performance. Many contact center agents and claims professionals also work remotely. This environment makes it challenging to pinpoint common technical issues like latency (the voice delay between a customer and agent speaking via phone) and jitter (such as choppy audio or dropped calls), and even more difficult to resolve them quickly.

On top of that, if a storm causes a network outage, customers can lose connectivity and have trouble contacting their provider. It’s crucial that they know how to reach their providers before severe weather strikes, so they’re not left in the dark. If a carrier knows that a storm or wildfire is approaching, it can prepare by alerting customers to potential outages via email or social media, sharing alternative ways to file claims through mobile apps or portals, adding website banners, or posting direct links to claims documents. Proactively guiding customers helps ensure communication remains uninterrupted, even when core systems go down.

However, technical problems like these are not unsolvable. By taking steps like implementing greater monitoring across the network and embracing proactive testing, IT teams at large insurance providers can ensure that technical issues like these do not hinder a smooth claims process.

The Hidden Cost of IT Performance Issues

Insurance customers spend thousands on premiums every year. These costs are only continuing to rise amid historically high inflation. It’s not hard to imagine how a customer facing technical issues like garbled audio, dropped calls or a persistently poor mobile application experience might consider alternative providers if they feel they’re not getting the service they are due. Indeed, in a 2022 report, Accenture estimated that a poor claims experience had led at least 30 percent of customers to switch carriers in the prior two years. For IT leaders, this is more than a helpdesk problem. It’s a chance to prove how infrastructure investments directly impact customer satisfaction, retention and even regulatory risk.

Preventing Service Disruptions Before They Happen

Many organizations know they need greater observability of their systems and infrastructure to resolve problems more efficiently before they become customer experience headaches. However, relatively few organizations have invested in deploying network observability comprehensively to achieve this goal. They may be monitoring highly sensitive information hosted on their on-premises data center, for example, but lack detailed information about cloud and remote performance issues, creating visibility gaps that undermine their ability to pinpoint root causes.

Embracing deep packet inspection at scale provides a foundational layer of enhanced observability to pierce through the complexity of modern IT environments. For insurance carriers, where uptime for portals, claims processing systems and agent tools directly impacts customer satisfaction and regulatory compliance, deep packet inspection at scale offers granular visibility into network traffic. This allows IT teams to diagnose performance anomalies—whether it’s a cloud handoff issue, third-party SaaS latency or a misbehaving API.

Synthetic testing, on the other hand, proactively simulates user transactions across various geographies and network conditions. For example, it can mimic a claims adjuster accessing the system from a remote branch or a customer filing a claim during peak hours. This approach acts as an early warning system, detecting and isolating issues before they affect policyholders or internal operations.

Together, deep packet inspection and synthetic testing form a powerful, complementary approach to network observability. By expanding observability across the entire digital ecosystem—from data centers to remote contact center agents—IT teams can learn to prevent small issues from escalating into full-blown outages.

For insurance carriers navigating rising digital complexity and growing customer expectations, this combination significantly strengthens their operational resilience. The result is uninterrupted claims interactions, fewer frustrated customers and a technical infrastructure that reinforces the brand promise insurers make every day.