Claims officers for property-casualty companies plan to put money into technological improvements over the next two years.

A survey, from the Towers Perrin global professional services company, found that 74% of claim officers reported their main objective for making technology-related investments over the next 24 months will be to improve the customer experience, while 69% pointed to improving cycle times.

The majority (66%) of survey participants are aiming to improve their management information system and reporting capabilities.

“Carriers have specific objectives for making technology investments over the next two years which, in turn, support broader low cost and expense reduction goals,” said Kathleen Cullen, Towers Perrin senior consultant and co-author of the survey report, in a statement. “Based on the findings, it’s clear that carriers are making investments aimed at improving or replacing front-end and back-end claim systems – ultimately leading to improved bottom-line performance.”

Predictive modeling or the technology-driven use of advanced statistical techniques to simultaneously evaluate many potential explanatory risk factors, appears to be gaining little traction. Just 14% of respondents reported reaping high returns related to use of predictive modeling in their core claim operations, according to the survey.

Brian Stoll, Towers Perrin senior consultant and report co-author, said many companies’ current systems and data are not sufficiently developed to support predictive modeling. The difficulty in linking internal and external databases, and limitations on capital expenditures, has slowed the growth of claim predictive modeling.

“As company investments in claim technology and data/MIS yield positive returns, carriers will then be in a position to recognize comparable benefits of predictive modeling in their claim operations,” Stoll said.

Competing intra-organizational priorities, including coping with the current economic crisis, are seen as among the biggest hurdles to increasing claim departments’ use of technology, according to the survey. The primary obstacle cited by claim officers was other initiatives taking priority (70%) over claims’ capital investments.

“We see that, in light of the current financial picture for many firms throughout the industry, companies are more apt to enhance their current systems, rather than make large investments in a totally new infrastructure,” Cullen said. She noted that many firms are “being challenged” by platform limitations, business processes, even cultural issues, as hindrances to increasing the use of technology in their claim operations.

Exactly 39% of respondents said their current claim technology platform is a centralized mainframe, while 30% said their firm’s platform is a distributed client/server.