This is the second post in our series brining you the great conversations from our June Protection Forum. This section of the discussion looked at how support services are making protection more relevant for a wider population, and how promoting them is helping advisers get more people covered.
Value-added services are brilliant at getting consumers to value their policy.
I think the value added services, a digital GP, Second Opinion Services, LV=’s, British Friendly’s, AIG’s, I love these things. I think they’re brilliant. They’re great for salespeople, they’re great to, it’s not social responsibility, but it is giving something back everyday services so people are getting some value.
What we sell is a promissory note and it’s the worst promissory note that there is in the world: if you die, we’ll do something. If you have a serious illness, we’ll do something. Getting people to value their policy is crucial. And these are enablers to help us talk to customers about that. We now build individual pages for each insurer that has value added services so that we can text and email each customer two or three times a year reminding them of how to access these benefits. We’ve now brought in, effectively, all our customers are adopted onto our EAP, the same as all staff so that they are getting these value added services. So it enables us to have a good, positive reason to talk to customers and enables us to give them extra value that they can use throughout their policy lifetime. What’s not to like? And every insurer should be synonymous with that thrust.
We’re going to be publishing a Claims and Benefits report including our additional services.
I mean, obviously, most insurers publish a claims report and we’re no different in that. We’re going to be publishing a Claims and Benefits report, which will include the value of the additional services we provide. So back in 2019, we gave over £103 million worth of benefits back. So those additional rewards, et cetera. So we will be publishing that, I’d be happy to, we’ve already got a meeting to share that with you and the team very shortly.
There’s been a very large uptake in virtual GP services recently. Data is boring but stories about real people work.
I do know some of them, I’ve got some data but I can’t remember who it was, it might have been LV=, sort of webinar the other day and they put out a 600% increase uptake in virtual GP services. And they had a full range of their services and had shown how the uptake had really rocketed over the last year or so. So I know they’ve got that though, some of them are tracking it.
Going back to something else, if we could, even as a group of brokers, even as a network here, we can share stories. If we’re happy to share the clients’ stories and we can turn that into content. I know they’re our clients, but you probably have so few come along where someone has made a claim and it’s made a difference that if we can just share those. I think stories are the thing that really sell protection, more than data. Data is boring, if you see 90% of people die before a certain age and be sure that 95% percent of people consider themselves to be the 10% that don’t so the data just doesn’t work. You’ve got to you’ve got to resonate with people and telling stories. And I just don’t get enough clients to tell that kind of story.
And something else, if someone makes a kind of charity, whether we come up with some sort of charity where we maybe all put a little bit of money in a pot every year based on our sales. And we find a few families that didn’t have any protection. Are we going to change their lives? And we tell that story? I don’t know. Maybe there’s something like that. I always point to [someone] who finds a family where the dad has died. They’ve got no money. The house is falling to bits and they change someone’s lives. That stuff really resonates with me as a parent. And I think, “Christ, I don’t put my family through that.” And maybe we can create a few stories even where we make that impact and do some good.
We just released our first 4 years of stats of usage of our Health Wise Member Benefits app.
Just getting back to the comments just around added value services usage, and from our perspective, at The Exeter earlier this year, we released our first four years stats of usage of our Health Wise Member Benefits app, which did highlight some of the uptick in service usage and reasons for usage as well. And I think more of us need to do that. And it’s great to hear that Vitality is doing something similar just to really bring out stories from my perspective, we can produce as insurers in PDFs or videos and we can obviously track downloads.
But how useful are these things to intermediaries? How widely used are they to advisers to tell their stories? And I’m not trying to put myself out the job here or anything but, we can all produce content and numbers, but if that’s not used regularly in conversations and adviser conversations to promote then they’re not worth the paper they’re written on. And I’m sure they are used. But what’s missing? What could be better? And actually, how widely are they used would be my questions.
There’s a lot of stories of healthy people taking out a policy and then soon finding out that they had a critical illness.
Yeah, I’m not exactly, sure it was within the group, I’m not sure particularly where it was, whether it was in the South African or the or the American business. But we’ve got some of these case studies where a client has gone for a health check. So a normally fit adult male has bought a policy. This is a sales aide that we used a while back, and I think it’s still relevant now. But the client actually had the policy for about six months, I think went for a health check, identified early stage prostate cancer, and the chap had to take time off work as a result of that. We obviously made a pay-out to him under the serious illness cover. So this was somebody who was perceived to be in fit health. But as a result of using one of the additional services we spoke about earlier on around going for an early health check had this identified and as a result got a pay-out and managed to save his business as well. So there’s lots of stories like that.
There’s a push to increase access to income protection, and I think the time has come for it. Now is the time to talk about prevention. There should be a shift from ‘value-added services’ to ‘support services’ because they shouldn’t just be added, they should be central.
I have to agree with your comments. There is a government focus right now on building back better from Covid and Brexit. And where we are right now. There are three insurance discussions forming part of that. One of them is improving access to content insurance, particularly for renters on a pay as you go basis. The other is improving access to affordable insurance, particularly for younger people, again, telematics, pay as you go.
But the other, and I say this as someone who’s been on lobbying for 25 years on IP, there is now a focus on, in addition to pension sidecar with focus on workplace savings, improving resilience to shocks, and as part of that, improving access to income protection. And back to the comments you were making earlier, Ian, about the Life Happens and doing something similar in the UK, and as Ian alluded to, having a focus on disability and income protection insurance. Frankly, I think the time has come. I say that as someone who’s involved with Seven Families and failed miserably trying to get the ABI to support that with a follow up and the seven companies. But I think the time is there.
Equally, I think with the NHS, spending a lot of money now with social prescribing strategy, which is devoted to prevent. And social prescribing now reaching into social prescribing partnerships regarding financial services. Andy, in the work that he and his colleagues have championed in Vitality is absolutely spot on. Now is the time to talk about the prevent agenda. I’ll just talk briefly for me about added value services with a regulator that’s currently got a focus on value.
And by the way, that value debate is not just limited to general insurance, it extends to protections as well. The time has come to stop using the term “added value services” because it raises the question, “what the hell is the underlying value delivered by your core proposition if you’re not doing this anyway?” So I think change language. Let’s talk about support services, I think is more appropriate.
Advisers love to hear from other advisers about what they do that has/has not worked.
Setul Mehta:
Yeah, I mean, if they are simple and easy to use services and to talk about, so I’ll pick on Deadline’s red line because we know lots of people have used it because it’s easy and simple and straightforward, but there are plenty of others. And we find that advisers are using them. The other trigger, and this is one we haven’t really discussed today, but may play a part is we often get advisers to share their stories and their best practise and how they do that, because peers love to hear from their own. And as soon as somebody says “this is how I used to and how it’s worked,” whatever ‘this’ is, we do see a take up from other advisers who sympathise or think “I’ll give this a go.” And the third bit is from a network perspective, we promote it anyway because it would be our duty to do so. But actually the ones that are really good and easy to use, why would we not? Because it helps the adviser engage with the client and have that conversation.
