Back in 2019, I joined a podcast with Accenture where I said that to truly get people to do great work and best service your clients, you must support them in every way. This still rings true today.
It’s worth reflecting, however, on whether things such as artificial intelligence, insurtech, blockchain, and big data are delivering the assistance we expect. Have industry cost or efficiency ratios really improved as a result of the application of technology over the last 10 to 15 years? The short answer is no. But we can get on a better path.
First, we need to remind ourselves that people are the central ingredient to making the insurance industry run. The people help bring the deep and valuable complexity of the industry to life. When you put the people front and center, you allow for the technology to properly do its job in supporting the work and not be the main driver.
See also: Adding Humanity to Life Insurance
Once the people are in place, you can go back to the foundational work of insurance in providing advice, managing processes, and delivering service in a timely manner to clients. At CAC group, we focus on the placement process, which can be messy but, when broken down to its components, runs well despite the complexity -- and customers report being very happy.
The transition to digital in the insurance industry does not mirror others. Using banking or an iPhone as a comparison is a false premise and distracts all of us from what’s required. It is always smart to look outside our industry for exemplars, but taking a checking account and shifting it from the checkbook to the digital world is far simpler than having 100 insurer participants share and layer property placement. Similarly, an iPhone provides a wonderful experience in the art of simplicity but as an example of how simple things should be in insurance it would work only if all clients were more or less identical and wanted to be treated the same way despite highly varied preferences, risk profiles, exposures, locations and legal jurisdictions.
Ignoring these differences results in poor thinking and execution around what’s required to progress.
See also: Balancing Technology and Empathy in Claims
What to do?
Put people at the center of everything. We must view the use of technology through the lens of the customer and who is serving that customer. Everything in our business is filtered through people, which is a very good thing! Questions to ask include, Are the data we are consuming and the architecture that we are building truly helping serve the customer better, faster, and smarter? Do they have access to these elements in a customer-friendly way? Pursuing such questions will build trust in technology and tighten up all the data ingestion points where we can only rely on people, because their advice and knowledge are central.
We also need to realize that the transition to a more digital world will be slower than we might imagine. The best example of a digital transition in insurance is auto insurance. It is mainly a digital experience today, but the actual transition started 15 years ago.
We need to get our heads around that time and distance. As the transition occurs, we will need to run insurance businesses in two ways – for today and as a digital alternative. Clients can self-select into the digital experience, but it will not be comprehensive initially, or ever. It will begin to support simpler activities such as sharing dashboards and information and evolve into proactive analytic offerings.
If we are patient, we can alleviate many of the data challenges that limit progress today. When technology supports the people who drive the core business, we will be surprised at how ideas for improvement become organic. And all the data you need to support and advise a client is virtually identical to data you need to digitize the marketplace or enhance service offerings. We have just been attacking the opportunity from the wrong end.
All of this builds to hundreds of iterative changes that in total will be transformative. It shouldn’t surprise us that there is no silver bullet, Easy button, or magic pixie dust available to replace hard work, attention to detail and an approach centered on broker/client relations.
It requires industry leadership to believe in what’s valuable: our colleagues.
