Ed Note

If you recall the classic children's story, Pollyanna was a little girl who inevitably found the good in any situation. However, I have a feeling she'd be hard pressed to find anything to be glad about in our current economic crisis.

Yes, the media has taken to airing uplifting accounts of human kindness, ingenuity, and strength in bad times, but there still are all those thousands of layoffs, a bleak job market, rising foreclosures, bankruptcies, and on and on.

In this context, I remembered an old saying: If you lose your money, you've lost nothing; if you lose your courage, you've lost everything. While this, too, may be somewhat Pollyanna-ish, it has helped me to evolve my thinking about the current situation. Conditions definitely are difficult, but rather than looking at it as the end of what has been, perhaps we need to look at it as the beginning of something new instead.

And if it is, then what's next? The logical step is to focus on growth. While cost-cutting has been a key strategy of late, an emphasis on how to create growth has resonated more than ever–certainly out of Washington and in the boardrooms of corporate America, too.

That said, where will insurers find growth? Carriers must cater to their producers as never before to get the maximum business. The agent is where change for the better in this industry will start. And the ripple will help to boost the economy as a whole.

Now for the deceivingly simple question: How can insurers achieve this? According to a recent study by Celent, differentiation is essential. The areas producers value most are providing outstanding service, underwriting relationships (for more, see the cover story, p. 14), and issuing decisions quickly. Even though agents may be slow to adopt technology, the analyst firm advises carriers to take active steps, such as the use of PDAs and live underwriter chat. In addition, “business representatives within carriers should partner with their IT departments” to address existing and new distribution technology, say the analysts.

Interestingly, when agencies were asked by Celent to complete the sentence: “The technology improvements introduced by my leading carriers in the past two years have helped me . . . ,” 79 percent responded “provide better customer service while 63 percent replied “reduce time to issue policies.” That's what leading carriers are doing. What better place to begin a recovery?

With all the gloom, it's easy to get mired in it. Yet if insurers can implement successfully the right antidote, they will rise above the hard times and be stronger when we come out the other side. And if that's Pollyanna-ish, the girl, in this case, actually might be more realistic than na?ve.