This is the third post in our series from our February Protection Forum. In this section, attendees discussed the language and methods of communication used to deliver information to clients. Phil Briars, Protection Product Manager at LV= explained some of the work they’ve been doing to assess and improve how they communicate and Robyn Allen described her methods of explaining difficult concepts to clients.
Most clients get the documentation but then don’t read it until they need at, at which point they would be considered a vulnerable customer.
We go back and look through customer complaints and send out feedback surveys which also test their understanding of the products.
We have a member of the team who checks to make sure there isn’t any jargon clients won’t understand in the documentation. We’ve adjusted the order that material is presented in and created a front page that has all the most essential information they need on it.
We’ve created an interactive CI document that clients can click on to better understand what’s covered.
Phil Briars:
“I think by no means are LV=’s documents the best out there, so I’ll start with that. But we’re trying and it is a continuous improvement process. We’re reviewing and rewriting all of our documentation, whether it be the sort of presale or post-sale documentation. And there’s always something in there that we think we can be clearer on, make it easier to digest.
The advisers and distributors go through the pre-sale literature, but often it’s the provider that sends that post-sale literature out to the customer. The customer might not be with their adviser at that point, and they’ll pick it up and have a look at it, and then we all know it goes in the mythical kind of drawer or cupboard.
And that’s where all of our important documents seem to be and customers don’t tend to look at them until the moment of truth. They skim, read them and then when they actually are ill or a loved one has passed away or they’ve got a critical illness, suddenly they’re looking for this document. Their minds are not in the right place.
And I think we’d all agree, the regulator’s focus is quite heavily on vulnerable customers, and at that point in time, those customers would be considered as vulnerable. So we really do have to take that into account when designing these documents for laymen and people who aren’t in the industry. One of the things we do and I think probably all the providers probably do, is have this review process on an annual basis. We have to go and look at our products and dig deep into where they’re working, where they’re not. And that’s on legacy old products and the products we sell now.
And one of the things we really take into account when we’re doing those reviews is verbatim comments and complaints from customers. We get those from reviews and we do a lot of post-sale surveys as well.
So we send out to sometimes thousands of customers a survey, not huge or long, just asking them a few basic points about the product that they are now paying for. Did they get the documents? Were they easy to read? How much of it did they read? Did they look at them in the minute detail? And within that, we also do some pretty simple but quite telling true or false questions as well. So we asked them a few questions about their policy. Does it do this? Will it do that? Or it does do this or it doesn’t do that? And those questions are great because they give us a real understanding of there’s really clearly something not quite right in the understanding.
And what we’ve actually started to do on all of these post-sale surveys now is we’re trying to follow them up and we have a team of people to help them if something was lot of misunderstood.
And it comes back as well quite nicely to what was talked about earlier in unemployment for IP. We do ask specific questions around whether people think they’re covered for unemployment. And still, we don’t offer it on our new products, but we’re still getting those questions, all those answers coming back, “Yeah, I think so.” And again, if it’s not clear, we are following up those as well.
Getting feedback from our internal people is quite important, and we speak to our CSRs who are often younger people. And those young people amazingly want to understand what they’re buying and what they’ve got and have that information. We’re also going out to distributors, to forums like this and our account managers team for feedback.
We have someone on our team who works with tone of voice and ensuring we aren’t using too much jargon that a layman couldn’t understand.
We’ve put a lot of work into reformatting our documents and creating an ‘at a glance’ page on the cover. We include what we will and won’t cover and what value added benefits they have on that page. We put our contact numbers in the front and moved up our glossary of terms. We’re including more examples to help people understand more complicated terms.
Our CI guide to our definitions is an interactive PDF where you can click on it, it takes you to that condition and it gives you an idea of what it means, what parts of the body it actually affects, the incidence rates, that sort of thing. It’s useful for advisers to use with their customers or just for customers to use when they’re looking through the document. I can’t even pronounce some of the terms on critical illness cover. So this document makes it easy for people like me to read as well.
We’ve still got lots of work to do, but we really welcome your feedback and are doing quite a lot to act on it.”
To me the most important thing is to keep it simple and making sure there is a clear foundation that everything builds on. There are so many terms that different insurers have for the same things and it makes it complicated for the customer.
We also need to be realistic about how much financial knowledge people have, and we often need to use really simple language to explain because they don’t know the terms.
As an industry, we need to agree on a set of terms that everyone uses—you can have different versions and pricings and benefits, but the language needs to be consistent.
Robyn Allen:
“It’s really reassuring to hear the level of work that is going on behind the scenes. I must say, so Phil, thank you for that insight because it does make me feel better as an adviser that these things are at least being looked at. When it comes to my content and the initial communication with people, for me, it’s keeping it simple. Yes, I could sit there and do a five minute long video about exactly what critical illness is and what it does. They’re not going to watch it. They’re not going to understand it.
You don’t teach someone how to read by handing them the Encyclopaedia Britannica. You teach someone to read with pictures and then you add in some basic words and then you add in a sentence. And that’s kind of how I’m taking this approach now, I am making sure that everything is working its way through from the foundation and it’s a building block.
There are so many things that every insurer does slightly differently, and I think at times we underestimate those tiny changes. Age costed versus age banded, waiting times, deferred periods or a waiting period. They all mean the same thing, but every insurer uses it slightly differently. Some talk about those deferred periods/waiting periods in weeks, some talk about them in months. It’s too much for a consumer to take in, and especially when running comparisons. And I’m sure it’s looking at one document going, Yes, this is nice and simple this way that this is nice and simple in another way.
So let me just teach you exactly how to do my entire job in five minutes so you understand that it doesn’t work. One of the things I think we also underestimate is people’s own financial knowledge. I think it’s great that when Phil was talking about using the CSRs to get their feedback on these documents, but they still have an element of financial services knowledge, how many times have you come across somebody that doesn’t actually understand the difference between gross and net when it comes to their income?
So we’re making an assumption really, that people understand it before we start, so we need to absolutely simplify everything. If they do understand the term at that point and go, “Oh yeah, you mean my net pay,” fantastic. You upgrade the level at which you’re talking to them at. Because they’ve shown they’re at that level.
The other real bugbear for me, and this is probably for a lot of you: critical illness versus terminal illness. How many people go, “Yeah, I’ve got critical illness,” and it’s because they’ve read that they’ve got terminal illness on their life cover because it wasn’t fully explained. And when you explain what critical illness is they go, “Oh, no, I haven’t. No, that’s not the one I’ve got.”
As an industry, we need to update our terms. Critical illness– I looked it up to double check my facts– was started in 1983. Ok, we’re in 2022. Critical illness does not mean what it used to mean for most people. Their version of the word critical is something wildly different to what it’s referring to with the insurance. And we all know it doesn’t necessarily have to be what someone would deem an ‘illness,’ which is why everybody thinks cancer, which is why I now tell people that the name of this means nothing. It’s generally something that is life altering and it’s going to impact you. It doesn’t mean it’s life ending. If it kills you, it’s your life insurance generally, because I’m talking generalisations.
For me, it’s keep it simple, it’s start at the bottom, and it’s not overwhelm at the beginning, and it’s just have those building blocks and build them up. And if they ask me a question and they’ve kind of got something in the wrong place, but they’ve remembered a term, I get really excited with them. I go, “no, you’ve remembered this, but you just need to put it over here in your brain right now. Let’s check that you’ve got everything.”
So for me, we all need as an industry to at some point, I would love it, agree terms agree what things are called and create that consistency. You can have slightly different versions of the products. You can have slightly different pricing and added value benefits. But if you agree the names, the consumers are going to have such a better experience because they’re going to be able to get true comparisons and understand and have knowledge that they can use, not jargon that they can’t.”
Rob Harvey: With, for example, ‘waiver of premium,’ how do you explain that and other terms to clients?
Waiver of Premium makes sense because it does what it says, but it’s not language that people use in their day to day lives. I often use hand motions to describe deferred periods so people can visualise what I’m talking about.
Robyn Allen:
I was thinking about this yesterday because once I got onto this topic, my poor other half, who was being ranted at for a good 20 minutes. Waiver of Premium is probably the only thing that I agree with its name. Because I went, “it waives the premium.” I don’t necessarily agree how it’s all put together and how it’s explained in brochures all the time, but it’s actually the one that makes the most sense.
But it’s not the language we use nowadays. How many times a week other than when you say ‘waiver of premium,’ do you use the word waive in that context? You don’t. So it’s old-world-y language in this day and age. So I explain that it’s an insurance policy for your insurance. That’s how I explain it.
When it comes to deferred periods, I tend to stick to using the word ‘deferred periods’ because it is deferred and I can use that. But what I tend to do because I’m on Zoom now is I’m like [demonstrating with hand motions], “right? This is the day you get ill or injured. This is the length of time that will pass. So it’s either that you’ve got sick pay for this long or this long.”
And I’m a full kind of handsy adviser, but I make it visual as well as verbal. So even if the thing that sticks in their brain is my stupid hand movements, it sticks in there somewhere. And I’ve actually had clients go, “No, I think we need that one” [shows hand gesture]. “One month then.” But we have to give them as much opportunity to absorb it as we can.
