What does it cost to handle a warranty claim by hand?
Measured from a real UK warranty operation, including the finding that surprised everyone involved.
Short answer. On a UK vehicle-warranty operation we instrumented, a manual claim took around thirty minutes end to end and one handler had a practical ceiling near fifteen claims a day. At a £22 loaded hourly rate that is roughly £11 of labour per claim, before any part is priced.
Where the thirty minutes goes
The claim itself is rarely the slow part. Assembling the facts is.
- Read the inbound email or portal submission and work out what is actually being claimed
- Work through the policy terms to establish whether it is covered — on the operation we measured, a 69-clause document
- Check the vehicle’s history against official records
- Identify the part, then find a defensible price for it
- Decide, write the response, and log it
- Handle the reply when the garage disputes the figure
Only the last two are decisions. The rest is retrieval, and retrieval is what automates cleanly — which is the argument in can claim assessment be automated.
The ceiling matters more than the average
Thirty minutes a claim implies a hard limit of roughly fifteen claims a day per person once breaks, calls and the awkward cases are counted. That ceiling is the thing that actually constrains a warranty business.
It means volume growth is met by hiring, and hiring is lumpy: you cannot recruit a third of a handler. So capacity arrives in steps while claims arrive continuously, and the gap between the two shows up as settlement delay.
If you are recruiting a claims handler right now, that ceiling is the reason. It is also the number worth checking before you fill the seat.
Measure the volume before you believe it
The most useful finding from that engagement had nothing to do with cost. When we instrumented the actual inbox, claim volume was about a quarter of what everyone in the business believed it to be.
Nobody had lied. The estimate came from how busy the team felt, and the team genuinely was busy — on a smaller number of much harder claims than anyone realised. That finding made the project smaller and the design better.
Count the actual items before accepting any figure, including your own.
The part nobody can price
Parts pricing is where the cost hides. Without a trade catalogue you cannot look a price up, so a handler searches for comparables, judges which are credible, and defends the figure to a garage that wants more.
On validation we found a case where the price a handler would reasonably have accepted was seven times a defensible market figure. Not fraud, and not incompetence — just one person with limited time against a garage that priced it daily.
What this adds up to
Fifteen hundred claims a year at thirty minutes each is 750 hours — roughly one hundred working days of someone’s time, and around £16,500 of labour, on assessment alone. That figure excludes the settlements that were higher than they needed to be.
Whether it is worth automating depends entirely on your volume and how much of the time is retrieval rather than judgement. The calculator will price it against your own numbers, and the claims engine write-up sets out the architecture and, plainly, that it has been designed and validated but not built.
Related questions.
On a UK vehicle-warranty operation we measured, around thirty minutes end to end: reading the submission, working through the policy terms, checking vehicle history, identifying and pricing the part, deciding, and handling the dispute that follows.
Around fifteen once breaks, calls and difficult cases are counted. That ceiling is what forces hiring as volume grows, and because you cannot recruit a fraction of a handler, capacity arrives in steps while claims arrive continuously.
At thirty minutes per claim and a £22 loaded hourly rate, roughly £11 of labour per claim before the part is priced. Loaded rate means the full cost of employing someone, not salary divided by hours.
Estimates usually come from how busy the team feels rather than a count. On the operation we instrumented, actual volume was about a quarter of what the business believed, because the team was working a smaller number of much harder claims.
Describe the process you want to automate.
You will receive a fixed price and a build plan.
There is no charge for the initial call and no obligation. You deal directly with the engineer who builds the system.