Journal
Reading reopen rates without emptying the reserve
Reopen rates are a favourite scare on a household slide. A file closed in good faith comes back, cost moves, and someone says leakage. Sometimes they are right. Often they have counted three different events as one sin.
A reopen can be a missed contractor invoice on the same escape of water. It can be a solicitor letter on a previously unrepresented injury sitting on a motor policy that also covers a house. It can be a second storm on the same roof, booked to the old claim because the handler recognised the address. Those are not the same management problem.
We ask for a reopen reason code if you have one, and we do not invent one if you do not. In the latter case we sample. Twenty files, read with claims, will usually sort a spike into invoice lag, legal capture, and true second events. The chart of the spike can wait until that sentence exists.
Reserving should not empty a bucket because reopens rose in a month when a panel solicitor sent a batch of letters. That batch is a timing story. It may still be a cost story, but it is not a reason to treat every closed file as suspect.
If your system reopens a file automatically when any payment posts, your reopen rate is a payment-process metric. Say so on the pack cover. Committees have taken comfort from a falling reopen rate that was only a slower finance team.
The useful question is which reopens still have no reason code after thirty days. Those are the files that deserve a named owner, not a red arrow on a slide.