During this year’s prolific rainfall and catastrophic flooding events, Weatherzone supported the insurance sector and helped minimise the impacts to their business.
Weather affects the insurance business at all levels of operation, from risk assessment to sales and claim management. For this reason, a sound understanding of short and long-term weather risks is an essential component of any insurance business.
Weatherzone Business offers a large range of geo-tagged weather and lightning information, so that you can keep your customers informed, whilst staying one step ahead of severe weather. We also offer a number of products to our insurance clients, such as StormTracker, SMS alerts, Storm Query, severe weather advisories and seasonal forecasts.
StormTracker
Weatherzone’s StormTracker provides businesses with a full situational awareness of weather threats. Including the alerts, real time lightning, forecast movement of dangerous thunderstorms (see DTAs), TITAN tracks, radar, satellite, weather, forecast fire danger and bushfire hotspots, gridded observations and custom overlays such as infrastructure and assets.
We can also alert for other weather perils, such as flooding rainfall, damaging winds and tropical cyclones. Weatherzone can deliver these alerts directly to your customers via SMS or email.
SMS alerts
We can alert our customers of imminent severe thunderstorms, severe weather or tropical cyclones. Our Early Warning Alert System (EWAS) notifies the insurer’s policy holders of the fast approaching severe weather, enabling them to get their cars undercover.
Our service can reduce the number of claims due to hail and severe weather and promote positive customer engagement. This weather alerting service ensures that policy holders hear from their insurer proactively, informing them to take action to protect their assets.
Our technology uses TITAN Tracks and Weatherzone’s own Dangerous Thunderstorm Alerts (DTAs) to send customers alerts of imminent severe weather 30 minutes in advance. The high precision alerts have the ability to alert on the customers registered address, allowing them sufficient time to take action.
This helps to reduce the premium payout by the insurance company and the number of insurance claims. These alerts can also be sent to the insurance provider enabling them to plan, up staff and alert customers.
StormQuery
StormQuery is a post event analysis tool that insurance providers can use to investigate claims. This tool uses Weatherzone’s Total Lightning Network database enabling the provider to determine if there was lightning and any other significant weather observations at or near a particular location on the date of the claim.
Severe Weather Advisories
Severe Weather Advisories can be sent to insurance companies each day detailing the risk of severe weather. This allows the provider to plan and take preventative action when severe weather is on the horizon. The company can upstaff call centres during a severe weather event, reducing wait times and improving customer service and satisfaction.
Insurers have embargo policies in place, which means they will not honour any new policies when severe weather is about to hit, making our advisories highly beneficial for the providers. For example, if a tropical cyclone is going to hit Far North Queensland in two days’ time, the insurance provider won’t approve new insurance policies in this region.
Seasonal forecasts
Weatherzone conducts detailed seasonal forecasts which can help with long-term planning out to six months. The seasonal forecasts are tailored to the business and can include risk of heavy rainfall and flood risk, tropical cyclones, thunderstorms, extreme heat, bushfires and much more. These forecasts can be delivered live online or face to face, allowing time for questions and increasing engagement.
For more information on our products or how we can help you with your business needs, please contact us at business@weatherzone.com.au.
