Award winner puts aside personal loss to help customers

When the Queensland floods struck in February, Natasha Blanch and her family had to evacuate their home in a neighbour’s aluminium boat.

The water had come into the storage and laundry areas and was starting to come into the house when she left. It was so high that the boat could barely clear the boundary fence, Blanch recalls.

“It was fairly dark and cold, and it was still raining. We had to make sure we weren’t going to hit any power lines,” she said.

It was a few days later when she got a call that a large commercial Vero customer in Toowoomba had also been impacted by the floods, so she went to assess the loss of their claim.

Blanch, who is a commercial insurance claims loss adjuster for Vero, promptly headed over to the site and got to work.

She listened, supported, and directed the claim for the customer and was able to get tradespeople to the site quickly.

“They definitely put a priority on it,” she said.

“I think they were out there within a couple of days to make the building safe.”

It wasn’t until later that the customer realised that Blanch had been affected personally by the floods herself. In fact, she had no electricity, forcing her to find alternate accommodation.

“We were lucky to be able to stay with some friends for about two weeks.”

Her dedication in the face of personal duress is one reason why Blanch is the winner of the Purple Mansfield Award for her humanitarian efforts.

She understands that getting businesses up and running again after a disaster is important for the business owners themselves but also a key factor in helping the wider community get back on its feet. The faster that people can return to their place of work, the sooner they can feel more confident about the future both financially and emotionally.

The customer in Toowoomba didn’t find out about Blanch’s situation from her.

“I only found this out through one of her colleagues. She continued to treat our claim in such a professional and empathic matter, given everything she had going on,” the customer said.

“Throughout the whole claims process, Natasha has been extremally informative, knowledgeable, and compassionate given what a stressful situation this has been.”

The Toowoomba claimant said people like Blanch are one of the reasons why the relationship with Vero is so strong. Blanch was dealing with several other customers whose needs she also put ahead of her own, remaining contactable and engaged even when her own life was being severely impacted.

Blanch said that being flood affected herself increased her sense of empathy for the claimants.

“I think it gave me a new understanding of the other side of the claims as a policyholder, rather than as the loss adjuster,” she said.

“It just made me understand it from another level.”

Blanch said that one of the reasons she enjoys working in the insurance industry is because she is able to help people. Putting others before self is natural once the scale of a disaster is clear, she said.

“There’s always someone else in a worse situation. You’ve just got to keep that mindset, I suppose.”

Vero have won the Gold Mansfield Award for overall claims excellence for the third consecutive year, underscoring the focus in the commercial insurance claims team on delivering best-in class claims. It is people on the team like Blanch who genuinely care about customers that enable such excellence.

Vero provides quality business insurance products to help protect Australian businesses. Because Vero believes that impartial specialist advice is paramount when it comes to selecting insurance, they offer their products through insurance brokers. With over 180 years of experience in providing insurance, Vero delivers an award-winning claims service so brokers can be confident in recommending Vero to clients. Vero provides brokers access to one of the largest risk engineering teams in Australia, as well as local BDMs, underwriting and claims teams who bring expertise, intelligence and experience to their relationships.