The years following Covid were relentlessly difficult for commercial claims teams across the market. Each time insurer operations began to stabilise, fresh disruptions - supply chain delays, soaring claims inflation and repeated surge events - knocked service levels backwards. The result? Poor customer outcomes and soaring Broker frustrations and AXA Commercial was as much in the firing line as any of its peers.
Chris Walsh, Commercial Claims Director at AXA Insurance, is frank about the situation he faced. “I’ve been involved in claims at AXA for 20 years but if you go back to 2022, it was a uniquely difficult time in terms of stabilising capacity across claims.”
Resource shortages meant calls weren’t always handled by people with the right skills or confidence, too many handoffs created delays, supplier processes were clunky and communication wasn’t transparent enough. Repeated attempts to address these issues were made, but external forces repeatedly set them back.
“We would recover to a point,” Chris says, “then a really bad weather event would hit and we would fall back again.” It became clear to him that AXA needed a resilient, sustainable and scalable claims model, one that wouldn’t slide every time unpredictable, external forces came to bear.
Building sustainable foundations
Rather than betting on a sweeping transformation programme - the kind Chris says often takes too long, costs too much and risks failing to land - he focused instead on building solid operational foundations through incremental change. The team established three core pillars: capacity, capability and process optimisation, with supply chain performance embedded throughout.
“We needed the right number of people, with the right skill levels, working with the right tools and through the right processes, all within the right kind of culture, to drive improved customer outcomes,” he says.
To strengthen capacity, AXA adopted a more sophisticated approach to workforce planning, informed by data to help predict the capacity levels required to meet the expected claims volumes, ahead of them increasing. With 13 products and a highly diversified customer base, this was a complex process to get right but ultimately, it created a more predictable operating rhythm for handlers and the wider Commercial business.
The capability issue was tackled by examining attrition and competency data, which revealed that too many new claims handlers were leaving within a year. One of the core reasons for that, the data revealed, was that while new handlers had increased levels of competence to support customers, they often lacked the confidence to manage them effectively.
AXA responded with GradBay and Clever Nely which introduced new training approach and techniques, quality checks and achievement targets, as well as more opportunities to apply theory in practice. Two full-time roles were created to deliver side-by-side coaching to new starts and to answer questions and validate any decisions they make, relieving existing claims handlers from that responsibility.
Seemingly small changes but they delivered stark results. In Commercial Motor, for example, we saw attrition rates reduce by 20% and they remain stable today. Alongside this, AXA invested in a Business Insights team to interpret claims performance trends, uncover risks and identify opportunities.
“They have all the analytical skills needed to look at the huge amounts of data we produce every day and identify the key trends, which then allows the wider team to drive targeted actions that will make a real difference for our customers and the business,” says Chris.
Incremental change, visible impact
This data-led, test-and-improve mindset has allowed AXA to make more targeted changes more quickly. Insight from brokers became central, supported by feedback captured through a new partnership with Gracechurch, an independent benchmarking firm that tracks broker and customer sentiment across the market.
“That blend of proprietary and market data has deepened our insight into the customer and broker experience, which allows us to make really targeted changes, the kind that we know will have an immediate impact on improving customer outcomes,” he says.
For example, in commercial motor claims we rapidly responded to brokers’ concerns about how the FNOL validation questions delayed the claims process. We also reviewed customer challenges to roadside assistance and our 24/7 offering proposition. AXA saw the feedback and reacted, changing the process in a matter of weeks.
“Brokers couldn’t believe it,” says Chris. “They could see that we had listened to them and acted, and that kind of response goes a long way to taking them on this journey with us. They can see that we respond to their needs and we do so quickly.”
AXA has also strengthened face-to-face engagement, with brokers increasingly commenting that they feel the insurer’s presence and influence through its Claims Relationship Management teams. Crucially, the results of this renewed engagement are evidenced in the feedback data.
AXA’s Gracechurch NPS improved from -30 to -1 over the course of 2025 – an unprecedented shift. However, Chris is clear that more improvement is needed to move from good to great. Elsewhere, in lower-value property claims, average settlement times have significantly reduced to from an average of 200 days to approximately 15 after rethinking process thresholds and directing appropriate cases through a streamlined fast track desk top team.
But real change requires more than new systems and processes powered by better data. Chris is candid about the cultural work that is required to support his commitment to continuous improvement.
“It took a while, but people are more confident now to speak out about things that aren’t working or that they want to change,” he says. “The more that people see their voices being listened to, the more they will speak up and that goes for brokers as well as AXA’s people.”
What comes next?
Chris lays out a pipeline approach to change that runs immediate operational fixes in parallel with system enhancements and longer-term automation or AI opportunities to drive further improved customer outcomes.
Those longer-term goals are just as important as the quick fixes and AI will initially be used to augment handlers’ capabilities - helping them speed up assessments or remove administrative work - with more sophisticated applications around policy interpretation, liability decision making and claim valuations to be introduced in the coming months and years.
But Chris is clear that people will remain central, particularly when interacting with our customers: “We have a diverse range of customers and products and while AI will play an increasing role, our people remain central because of their expertise and the empathy required through the claims journey.”
Change is happening at AXA and the results show that the incremental approach is the right one. And while he is keen to showcase everything the team is doing to quell that longstanding broker dissatisfaction, he says it isn’t a one way street.
“We need brokers to come on this journey with us so we need to be more transparent about what we need from them to get a claim moving as quickly as possible, he says.
But the core message to brokers is clear: “Have the belief and faith in the journey we have been on for the last 18 months,” he says. “Our transformation is not over, and it probably never will be, but have confidence that we are changing in the knowledge that those changes are almost entirely informed by broker feedback, driving improved customer outcomes”.