Engaging Customers: February Protection Forum Part 4

This is the fourth post from our February Protection Forum, where attendees discussed engagement through apps, sustainability, and use of videos and other media to relate information to customers.

Shaun Ware:

I think that I understand a lot of the work that we as insurers are doing to simplify language, to make products more interesting, more readable. And I also appreciate the absolute minefield that must be in place for advisers because there isn’t a huge amount of consistency. We are doing some great things.

We did some research last year and 52%, I think it was 52-53% of respondents who said that the language which insurers use for income protection was easy to understand. So I think that’s a great tick in the box for doing things better, and I think we are trying to simplify things as an industry more. But that’s still just a little over half.

So I do think that we can do a lot more. A lot smarter, a lot simpler, and I think we’re our own worst enemy sometimes in the way that we communicate. I think the fact that we still have, massive bugbear, we still have jargon busters, for example, that they exist. That just immediately says, “Well, you’re not doing something right, you’re not explaining something properly if you still have to have a jargon buster.” And I think it’s a slow burn. I don’t think there’s any quick wind solution, necessarily that we flick a switch and tomorrow everybody’s communicating consistently and simply.

But from an adviser perspective, what could we do as a quicker win? What would make sort of life easier from day one? Is it a consistent approach to terminology across providers? And how could we how could we collectively get some effort together to make things happen?

I suppose from my perspective, I’m just curious whether any of the insurers are looking to develop things like apps. I think of my banking and I just have a little banking app and I can see my accounts and it allows you to drill down into different levels. And I think things like that would be particularly useful when you consider things like GIO, when we’re talking about income protection, people changing jobs or their income changing.

Because if someone’s signed up to an app, I imagine it would be relatively easy to push out notifications to them on a regular basis to say, every three months, “have you have you started a family? Have you moved home? Have you had a job increase? If so, it might be worthwhile reviewing your insurance.”

Because unfortunately, even as a broker that might try and reach out to every one of my clients every year, often I look at GIO terms, you’ve got to do it within three months. So I’ve either got to get really lucky that I’ve contacted them…

And I had a client the other week and he says, Oh, I sorted out my mortgage and and it 10 weeks ago,” he had just re-mortgaged and all the rest of it. Now, I hadn’t done his life insurance. I was looking at something else. But he said, “Oh, I think I need more life insurance.” And I was like, “Hang on,” I looked and he had three months or so. You got two weeks to go back to the insurer and say, You know, I’ve changed my mortgage. Can I just use GIO? And I said this could be a much cheaper option for you. It won’t cost, you know, I won’t earn a penny, but you’ll be better off.

And I just think apps would surely allow people to just go on and go to it. This is the amount of life cover I’ve got on my income protection is based on this salary, and if I want to understand what that means, I can press a button and go in a little level pushing out notifications. It’s a year since you took out your life policy or there’s an indexation. Your life insurance is now going up to this. Do you want to accept your ending? You know, there’s so many things that actually would just allow people to have that information in one place.

Because, like you say, I speak to clients that have got existing stuff and I say, Well, what have you currently got? And they go, I don’t know. And the best they can normally do is go to a bank statement and say, OK and see, I’m giving a Aviva £75 a month. I don’t know what it’s for.

And it’s just to help them. I sometimes got to get Letter of Authority or saying just so I can take some of the pain away from them. And I just you’d think that there would be really simple technological solutions that probably cost the insurers a fortune to develop, but would make a huge difference.

They seem to be doing it with the additional services a lot at the time, so I can get my app and… I don’t see why they can’t build the two together. And what a way of keeping that individual informed and engaged because actually, maybe I will use my virtual GP service all the time. But what if in the same place as my virtual GP service, I can also see my cover? And you’d think they could be pairing those up, keeping people engaged, valuing their insurance more, less likely to cancel it. Christ, I really use my app for this, that and the other, and I forget that it’s linked to my life insurance policy. I’m surprised where we’re not years ahead.

Ian McKenna:

Firstly, before I actually come to the main thing, I am going to say to insurers and we had a lot of conversation on this about a year ago about Forum, if you’re building apps, build in the ability to share information with the advisers. If you’re building apps, please, please, please don’t cut the adviser out of the process. We actually have some quite interesting conversations about did you have a two stage app, one of the application and then taking over.

But the main thing I’m going to… please, if you’re thinking about that and it’s very valuable and I will tell you absolutely why you should do it and why all your board, even if they don’t realise it, want you to do it. We’ll be bringing out something later in the year. We’re currently working with some carbon footprint consultants and we are going to be bringing out… we’re doing workplace pensions first, but insurance is next. Protection is next. We’re going to start working out what the carbon footprint is of each insurer’s relationship with their customers. And I’ve been talking to some of you, not all, I’ve been talking to some of your organisations that are C-suite level.

There’s one particular organisation, actually, I thought would be hugely against this. And the group CEO was so positive it wasn’t true. Of course, it might influence that many insurers are going out to all the organisations who are investing and saying, “we are going to base your director’s bonuses on your ESG credentials.” So that’s probably an influence that all the boards are now being incentivised on their ESG credentials.

And let’s face it, it’s more effective for insurers to communicate with people electronically. You don’t actually save money, I know it’s frequently positioned as saving money. The reality, though, I know from organisations that are good at this, is you get a far better engaged customer. And this is something, full disclosure, this is one of the ways we’re going to be using the data. I think there are quite a few consumers, especially younger people, who when we come up with the rating that shows the environmental footprint of each policy, that would be a criteria that we’ll allow people to search on. And if two insurers are in every way similar, but one’s got a better carbon footprint, I think there are a lot of consumers out there that will focus on that.

It does frustrate me a bit, I look at investment providers at the moment. They’re all making very bold statements about requiring the companies they invest in to be carbon neutral by 2030, 40 50, whatever. I haven’t seen anyone yet publish any data on how much paper they’ve taken out of the business.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there is a huge paper shortage at the moment and Aberdeen had to delay their takeover of Interactive Investor because they can’t get the paper to go out to customers. But I’m talking to a company at the moment that creates something of the order of seven billion pieces of paper for our broad financial, life, pensions, investment… seven billion pieces of paper a year.

And all these companies are talking boldly about what they’re doing, about going to being carbon neutral. How many organisations have really removed paper from the process, I think it’s a great way to engage customers. I think customers will actually love it.

Adam Higgs:

There’s been a lot of talk about the language and what clients are willing to read. But my question is: why do they have to read it in the first place? There’s lots and lots of technology, and I’ve seen subsequently input in the group, and this has been about for some time as well, at least three or four years.

There’s companies out there that can convert things into animated videos, which could easily be used to explain, perhaps not a full T&C document, but certainly you could break it down into segments. And if there is something that you need to explain to clients, you could have a video that they could go off and explain. And as Lee said earlier, if you’ve got apps, which is highlighting what that client’s covered for, there could quite easily be a link within that to: what is this? Here’s a short 30 second video, which will explain what that is.

I don’t see any of that happening, really, across the industry. And it is something that has been very doable for a good number of years and something that I think could be used to engage people– whether it’s on YouTube, whether it’s in an app, wherever it is. Short videos are far more consumable than reams and reams of paper.