What are best practices for catastrophe (cat) claims surge management?

• A. Do not pre-plan; deal with surge as it arrives.
• B. Pre-plan resources, establish triage criteria, standardize intake, rapid communications with insureds, and conduct post-cat reviews to improve readiness.
• C. Wait for regulator directives before acting.
• D. Use only in-house adjusters and ignore external partnerships.

Answer: (B)

Proactive planning and scalable, standardized processes are essential for catastrophe claims surge management. By pre-planning resources, you ensure a ready mix of adjusters, vendor partners, and technology that can be mobilized quickly when a catastrophe hits, avoiding delays and capacity gaps. Establishing triage criteria lets you rapidly separate high-severity or complex claims from routine ones, so the most critical cases get attention first and workflows don’t get bottlenecked. Standardizing intake with clear data requirements and uniform verification reduces confusion for insureds and speeds up adjudication for staff, which matters when volumes spike. Rapid communications with insureds—providing timely updates, expected timelines, and next steps—improves customer experience and reduces unnecessary follow-up. Post-cat reviews capture lessons learned and drive improvements in playbooks, training, and partnerships, so readiness improves for the next event. Approaches that wait for regulator directives or rely solely on in-house staff tend to be slower and less adaptable, while ignoring external partnerships limits capacity and resilience.