What role can claim stories and case studies play in engaging with consumers?

Robert Harvey: I guess this very brief bit that we’re going to talk about now, is quite important, because what we’ve spoken about before is engaging more consumers, ultimately reaching more people. Then we’ve spoken that kind of providing advisors with the tools to help them recommend the right solution, sell more products to those consumers. And obviously, at the end of all of this, there will be some people that then claim on those protection policies that we sell them.

What I want to just briefly talk about in this session is I suppose really more than anything else, claims, case studies and how we use those, how we create those, how we promote those, how as an industry we can use those claims stories to really highlight the importance and the value of protection insurance, whether case studies actually do work, whether they are effective, and if they are, how best to use those. And the reason I want to talk about this is because, consistently when consumer research is done, unfortunately, the case is that a lot of consumers still don’t trust insurance pay-out rates. They still don’t believe that the insurers pay out when they need to claim on those products. Partly, I think because protection maybe gets tainted by other insurances. Throughout the pandemic, we heard about business interruption policies not paying out because of clauses around natural disasters and pandemics and stuff like this. So protection insurance kind of gets lumped into that as any of us on this call hopefully know, that’s not the case.

The overwhelming majority of protection policies, pay-out claims are paid and they can have an enormously positive impact for those people that do protect themselves. And there’s countless stories out there now of the impact. I noticed there was a story on the BBC website this morning about somebody who’s a presenter on a podcast about cancer, who’s now going into hospice care, just a 40-year-old lady who’s got bowel cancer, unfortunately now facing down the end of her life. I think it hammers home the importance of being protected and what we can do as an industry to get more stories out there.

I’ve got a couple of people that I’m going to just ask to speak briefly. And I’m going to come first to Stacy Reeve from AMI, because recently AMI put out a report in partnership with IPTF and the Protection Distributors Group called ‘Entitled Saving Protection Policies’ and included some guidance on how advisors can ultimately ensure that protection policies are not cancelled against the backdrop of the current cost of living crisis. And part of that report highlighted that one of the things that advisors should do is promote and use claims case studies with their clients.

Stacy Reeves: So we’ve refreshed the guide. We originally created it in 2020 because of the pandemic, where there was a bit of uneasiness around whether clients were going to start cancelling their protection direct debits. And we thought with the cost of living crisis that we’re now all facing into, which really is starting to hit home for many people kind of the last couple of months, that now would be an opportune moment to refresh the guide. We’ve also created a consumer facing guide as well that focuses more on making sure clients think about why they bought protection in the first place, any additional services they might have access to, and we’ve had really good feedback on those guides. So just wanted to make you all aware that the guides are freely available to anyone.

As Rob mentioned, we have referenced the Seven Families Campaign in this guide, along with the fact that many insurers have on their websites claims case studies. And I wanted to link back to our viewpoint research that we did last year where we found that with mortgage brokers, out of those surveyed, only 4% were sending claims case studies to clients. So definitely in the mortgage broking space I think they are very much under-utilised. Then if we look at the consumer research side in terms of how they view and perceive this type of content, we found that 38% of 18 to 34 year olds said they’d find claims case studies valuable, with a similar percentage for those with young children. And it was actually more popular than receiving insurer claims statistics where the figure for those demographics was about 27%. So I think it just shows particularly those kind of age groups and demographics, that kind of purposeful content really does resonate with them. Obviously there’s a lot more that we need to be doing to be getting them out there to the clients.

And the other comments that I would just add, and it links back to something that really stuck with me from the Women in Protection Conference the other week was around representation – I do think there is a bit more that maybe can be done on some of these case studies to represent a wider group of people. Linking back to some of the comments as well regarding kind of influencers and things, I think it’s so important that these are authentic and I think maybe there’s more we can do in terms of how we get these out there. Could we do more with podcasts where someone’s speaking to someone that’s claimed rather than just videos and text documents and even shorter clips, that could be shared on social media linking back to the successes that a lot of advisors have shared on those platforms. In summary, I think certainly from a mortgage broking perspective, there’s more that can be done, but I think they’re a really great tool. Definitely need to be utilised more. I just think that there are brilliant tool to really engage with people and make it real.

Robert Harvey: Great. Thanks, Stacey. We’ve got a number of case studies on our website, which I’d encourage everyone to have a look at and use and share. I’m going to briefly come to Shaun Ware now from The Exeter to just get a slightly different view on this, from the point of view of working as an insurer / for an insurer. And I suppose kind of how you as an insurer see those stories as being used by advisors or we used within the wider industry and the impact that they can have, I suppose ultimately on highlighting the importance of protection insurance.

Shaun Ware: I think for me, the bottom line is the impact that they can have from an emotional impact. I think they can be hugely important, as Zoe said earlier, you know, people buy into people. And actually having real life stories is far more powerful than a cold faced insurer telling you why you should be buying a policy. So I think they are hugely, hugely important. Being perfectly honest, I think as an insurer we need more consistency in terms of frequency of delivery across the board, in terms of we seem to have claimed season and we might have a little spate of case studies that come out in and around that. I think we need some consistent delivery of claim stories throughout the year. I think some insurers do the whole case study thing better than others and I think it’s an area where we could potentially improve on in terms of frequency of the story that we tell.

It’s interesting what Stacey just said there as well – from an insurer perspective, predominantly we go out with a video or a PDF document of a text version of the story. I think what’s important is that we bring advisors on board within that storytelling just so that we can understand the market a little bit better. Because ultimately we push these case studies out for an advisor audience who we then hope use that with consumers. But actually if we can involve advisors and take some of the feedback from the earlier session, we need to produce content in a format that appeals to those advisors clients that will be best suited to that audience and also appeals to a wide range of demographics. Because if all I’m seeing is case studies of people with grey hair who’ve claimed for a bad back or cancer and they’ve got a family, but I’m actually a 21 year old in my first job I’m naturally just going to think ‘that can wait until later life, well that doesn’t appeal to me’. So we need to be probably smarter in terms of how we get that content out there and I think that’s where it’s really important to get advisors on board because ultimately, you know your customers better than we do as insurers. That might be different for those who’ve got really good D2C comms channels, but I think the advisor angle in is really important as well. And ultimately, if we’re producing case studies in formats that don’t necessarily work for you, then it doesn’t really matter how strong that message is. If people aren’t actually going to see it, then it’s a waste of effort. So I think there’s some collaboration that needs to take place as well to get the most out of the stories. Because ultimately for me ,I think they are the most powerful way that we can sell the benefits of protection.

Robert Harvey: Yes, absolutely. I totally agree with you, Shaun. I think that what we as an industry, and I guess this is that this is a challenge for insurers as much as for advisors, is that working together at the moment. I think what tends to happen is case studies are produced by and large by product providers, insurers. And I can’t recall having seen too many where the advisor is brought in and involved in that discussion as well alongside the client. I guess that maybe talks to some of the issues we have more generally in the way that advisors are notified around claims. Sometimes the relationship that certain advisors maybe have with their clients, but I think absolutely involving more advisors in those stories and whether it be the advisor and their client sort of talking one on one with a film crew or whatever it might be, I think can be really powerful.

I think it was Adam mentioned earlier on that a few years ago, Roy McLaughlin and Simon Thomas the ex Blue Peter and Sky Sports presenter sat down and and spoke together, client and advisor talking about the impact that having protection insurance had had and just how important that was. I think everybody in the room was probably pretty struck by just how powerful a conversation that was. I guess if nothing else, really what I wanted to try and achieve with this forum is really, I suppose, more of a call to action for everybody in attendance, advisors and insurers, for us as an industry to do a lot more in working to generate these stories and share these stories. I’d encourage all of you to go on our website and have a look at claim stories we have on there. So on the main site, you can find our claims, facts and figures page here. Within that, there’s a whole load of claims stats and what have you and various bits of content centred around claims. Within the that page are the claims case studies and stories. One of the interesting things that we’ve struggled to do is get life insurance stories. I don’t know whether any insurers have been successful in that.

I suppose it is a slightly different scenario and consequently perhaps a little bit harder to engage with those clients given the very difficult situation they find themselves in, but there are a number of videos on here that advisors can use and can share with their clients, and I would absolutely encourage these to be shared with clients. I know when I was advising, we would embed these videos into remarketing campaigns that we would send to clients at various different times throughout the year and use those to really highlight the value and the importance of protection. For example, we’ve got a number of stories here on support services from a range of different insurers. We’re fairly happy to take content from anybody to publish on here. So any insurers that are in attendance that want to publish some content on here, please absolutely send it to us because we’re really keen to share as many of these stories as possible. I think what’s quite pleasing when I looked at this the other day and reflecting on a comment that was made at ‘Women In Protection’ is actually there’s quite a good gender split as well on some of the stories that we’ve published on here. So we’ve got some income protection ones as well. Again, from a fairly decent split of insurers on here. And again, not a bad gender split.

And then finally, some critical illness stories as well. We are always adding to this. So please do check back, bookmark it, and use these use these with your clients because I think they can be very, very powerful and can have a real impact. When somebody looks at one of these videos and realises that actually the people that are featured on these videos like this recent Aviva example, it could be them. These are not sort of extremes. These are these are people like us that are that are going through life changing illnesses and different conditions and scenarios that really highlight the value and the importance of protection.

So my session today has been very brief, but as I said, I hope if nothing else we can take away from this that that as an industry, I think there’s more we can do. I think throughout the year as Shaun said that there tends to be a bit of a focus around this time of year on publishing claim reports, publishing claim statistics, the sort of 98% of claims paid; but I don’t know if they necessarily always have the impact that we would like. I think there’s a real need to keep that momentum throughout the year, keep that message going that actually claims are paid. And as the story highlight we can have a really positive impact.

Some of the advisers who spoke earlier, and indeed all of you, can obviously play a really, really important role as well in sharing this content on your social media channels. If you’re not on social media, just simply sharing those stories with your clients, emailing to them, linking through to those pages and showing them that content. And hopefully we can start to overcome that myth that persists that insurance doesn’t pay out because we know it does, as these stories illustrate.