Spring has sprung, the smell of fresh flowers wafts through newly opened windows, and every baseball fan's team still has a shot at the pennant. Ahh, if only all fools were merely captives of sports daydreams. Unfortunately, it appears there are far more fools than suspected lurking within our own industry.
Those of whom I speak were revealed by recent articles and presentations from my friend and agency consultant extraordinaire Chris Burand. As one example, Chris wrote the following in his December 2014 Burand's Insurance Agency Adviser newsletter:
While agents can definitely offer crucial and important education to consumers, in both personal lines and commercial clients, they too often choose to not offer any education, any coverage reviews, nor even review the insureds' true coverage needs.
How ironic. The vast majority of consumers want what agents have to offer. The vast majority of agents aren't delivering it.
Take a moment to consider the use of a checklist. Properly included within a fact-finding interview, proposal or policy renewal review, using a list takes no great additional time—in fact, I'd argue that it actually makes the time you do spend with the client or prospect more focused and better utilized. What part of better coverage recommendations, higher sales, increased revenues and lower E&O exposure isn't worth a few seconds of extra effort?
Create a checklist for your customer
If your hang-up is a specific checklist you hate, find another or create your own. Any one is better than none.
For example, perhaps a list that consists of forms, endorsement or coverage names strikes you as confirmation of all the "dry insurance stuff" so many believe is typical of "boring" P&C. But instead of ignoring all those benefits, why not try another approach?
Many years ago my good friend Mike Edwards and I teamed on a multi-week tour of Florida to teach agents the newly minted homeowners' ISO HO-84 program. One of the highlights was teaching from a comprehensive text of coverage analysis, claims examples and court case references created by one of the truly brilliant insurance gurus of this industry's history, Bob Smith.
When writing the chapter about perils, the natural point arose to explain the advantages of what was then referred to as "all risk" versus "named peril;" specifically, why the HO-3 is preferred over the then more popular HO-2; and why the HO-5 instead of the HO-2 or 3? The additional premium was often significant. The traditional approach was classic: Here are the exclusions. Overlooked was what seemed to be obvious: I see what you don't want to cover; what's left?
Bob decided that question was worth an answer, particularly in answering another key question: What makes this "all risks" worth the higher cost? Here are two "covered by all risk, not covered by named-peril" examples regularly cited by insurance publications and textbooks of the day:
-
A wounded deer crashed through a living room window and bled all over the carpeting.
-
A circus elephant escaped from a train and trampled buildings and property.
Follow Bob's lead and create your own checklists—or modify others—to identify the specific realities of your applicable prospects and clients. Do you need ideas? Convene an office meeting and swap common consumer questions and claims. Peruse my past articles and others from NU for coverage stories, claims examples or just to trigger your own ideas.
© Arc, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.