Claims Productivity Trap

Measuring adjuster productivity by file count is one of the most persistent mistakes in claims management.

High file closure rates can reflect excellent work or they can reflect rushed settlements, deferred investigations, and reopened claims six months later. If your metrics cannot distinguish between the two, you are incentivizing speed over quality — and quality is what actually drives loss outcomes.

The better question is not how many files an adjuster closed this month but what happened to those files after closure. Reopened claim rate, litigation rate, and reserve adequacy on closed files are all lagging indicators of quality that get obscured when organizations focus only on throughput.

Building a culture of quality in claims requires measuring what matters — outcomes, not activity — and then having honest conversations about what those outcome metrics reveal.