Hiring and Training for Empathy in Claims Handling

Job ads for claims professionals usually lead with hard skills. Employers ask for years of experience, specific credentials, or familiarity with particular systems. Those requirements are reasonable. They are also only part of what the job asks for, because claims handling is a communication role as much as a technical one.

Why empathy in claims handling matters

Claimants want their claims settled quickly and for the full amount their policy allows. A capable claims handler has to assess the loss accurately, read the coverage correctly, and reach a defensible settlement figure without wasting anyone's time.

That is only half the story.

Claimants have just experienced a loss. Sometimes it is a severe one. A house has burned, or a car crash has left someone shaken and without transportation. They are contacting their insurer for help, and while the help they need is primarily financial, they often also need a person on the other end of the line who sounds like they understand what happened. A handler who treats a claimant like a file number leaves them feeling processed rather than helped.

And that is the version where the claim goes well. Even with a skilled handler and good tools, it is not always possible to give a claimant what they want. Coverage has limits and exclusions that shape the settlement offer. Delays happen for reasons nobody controls, because a repair shop has a backlog or a specialty part has to be ordered from overseas. In those conversations, how the news is delivered changes how it lands.

Understanding empathy and its role in claims

Psychology Today defines empathy as "the ability to recognize, understand, and share the thoughts and feelings of another person, animal, or fictional character." It is what makes relationships possible and what prompts people to help each other.

Put plainly, empathy means putting yourself in another person's position. For a claims professional, that shift in perspective is the whole job on the human side of the file.

From where the claims professional sits, a car crash is routine work. From where the claimant sits, it may be the worst week of the year. When claims professionals stop registering that difference, they lose the ability to build rapport, and without rapport they lose the claimant's trust in everything else they say about the claim.

Can people learn empathy?

There is a common assumption that hard skills are learned while soft skills are innate. That is not quite right, though there is something behind it. Soft skills can be developed, but developing them is genuinely difficult. The British Psychological Society has quoted Bill Hester, an expert in occupational psychology, describing soft skills as often the hardest of all to master.

Difficulty is not the only obstacle. As an article in Entrepreneur has argued, soft skills are only learnable by someone who actually commits to learning them. Effort on the part of the organization does not substitute for interest on the part of the individual.

How to train for empathy on a claims team

Empathy is part of what claims handling requires, which makes it worth developing deliberately rather than hoping for it.

A note on the hiring half of that sentence. How an operation advertises, screens, assesses, and selects candidates is an employment-practice question, governed by employment law and the organization's own HR policy. Screening for a personality trait in particular carries real legal exposure and is not something to design from a vendor's article. That belongs with your HR team and your employment counsel. What follows is about what happens after someone is hired, which is where a claims operation has the clearest room to act.

• Provide coaching. Even naturally empathetic people struggle in specific situations: the third angry call of the morning, the denial conversation, the claimant who has lost more than the policy will cover. Coaching and roleplay give handlers a rehearsed way through those moments instead of improvising under pressure.
• Build a culture of empathy. Ask whether the operation is empathetic toward its own claims handlers. Culture sets the tone for how people treat each other, and a team that is not extended any patience internally is unlikely to extend much of it externally.
• Make sure claim handlers are not overwhelmed. This is the one most often left off the list. It is hard to give a claimant your attention when you are behind on every file you own. A handler who can barely keep pace with the queue does not have the minutes to listen properly, and no amount of coaching creates time that the workload has already taken.

That last point is where the operating model and the human one meet. Empathy takes time, and time is the resource that a claims workload consumes first. Anything that removes manual steps from a file, such as structured intake, automated assignment, and reporting that assembles itself, gives that time back to the part of the work only a person can do.

Teaching someone to be empathetic is hard. Teaching someone to use the software should not be.

In VCA, file handlers typically need 30 to 60 minutes of training, so a new handler spends their first week on claims rather than on the system. See what that looks like in claims management software built around how claims actually move, or request a demo against your own file flow.

Frequently asked questions

Why does empathy matter in claims handling?

Claimants contact their insurer after a loss, sometimes a severe one, and while the help they need is primarily financial, they often also need someone who sounds like they understand what happened. A handler who treats a claimant like a file number leaves them feeling processed rather than helped. Empathy matters most when the news is hard, such as coverage limits that shape the settlement or delays nobody controls, because how the news is delivered changes how it lands.

Can empathy be learned?

Soft skills such as empathy can be developed, but developing them is genuinely difficult and often harder than mastering hard skills. They are also only learnable by someone who commits to learning them, since effort by the organization does not substitute for interest on the part of the individual.

How can a claims team build empathy after hiring?

Coaching and roleplay give handlers a rehearsed way through hard moments, such as the denial conversation or the third angry call of the morning. The operation should also extend empathy to its own handlers, since a team shown no patience internally is unlikely to show much externally. Most important, handlers must not be overwhelmed, because a handler who can barely keep pace with the queue does not have the minutes to listen properly.