The insurance industry must adapt to new technologies, faster service models, and new ways of interacting with clients in order to keep up with changing consumer expectations, a panel of industry executives said on Wednesday.
At the Canadian Association of Independent Life Brokerage Agencies (CAILBA) Annual Conference in Toronto, speakers said that as consumers have become accustomed to getting instantaneous service and information from companies online – and particularly via mobile devices – the insurance industry is facing pressure to keep up.
“People are beginning to experience and understand and demand this level of service,” said Alex Melvin, president of Cannex Financial Exchanges Ltd. “It’s become an expectation from all of your clients, whether you’re an advisor, whether you’re an MGA or whether you’re a manufacturer, people expect this level of technology and access to information.”
“People want everything now, they don’t want to wait, and they want to get personalized information,” said Erik Kalin, vice president, IT strategy and innovation at Kingston, Ont.-based Empire Life Insurance Co. In this kind of environment, Kalin said, a 30-day turnaround period on issuing an insurance policy is not acceptable to consumers.
The industry should embrace technology as a tool to help speed up these kinds of processes, the panelists said. “It gives us the ability to streamline and simplify a lot of these things,” said Melvin.
The industry must also be open to new ways of interacting with clients and prospects, including social media. As consumers increasingly look to social networking sites such as Facebook for recommendations on products and services, the speakers said it represents a new platform for advisors and insurance companies to secure new clients.
“If you want to be leading edge, you’ve got to get out there and get into [social media],” said Kalin. “It’s a very easy way to network electronically.”
Although social media presents a risk that consumers could share negative experiences about advisors or companies, Kalin said it also provides a platform for clients to share positive experiences and recommend products and services to their friends.
“You have to look at social media as an amplifier,” said Kalin. “If you have really good customer service, people will talk about that, and it will get spread out and amplified a lot more than before we had social media.”
He suspects that this trend will increase, and that clients could begin to rate advisors online, similar to the way they rate hotels on TripAdvisor.com and restaurants on Yelp.com.
“This is where customer experience, and those interactions become even more critical, because you’re going to be under more and more scrutiny,” he said.
There are steps advisors can take to control their image on social media, the speakers said. For instance, consider inviting clients to share positive experiences via LinkedIn’s recommendation feature, said Mark Patterson, vice president of digital services at London Life.
“If you have good clients, they may be more than willing to write a recommendation for you,” he said.