Reasons to embrace technology
Glickman: The biggest macro business trend I’ve seen due to
the pandemic is the rise of digital technology in building
relationships and enhancing the customer experience. Hosting
remote meetings and educating through webinars instead of
seminars allows you to provide interactive and customized
solutions when and where your clients want it. Building
relationships in the digital era means you are the solution
provider that is top of mind and seen as the subject matter
expert.
My brother who was a software engineer for Amazon said
their #1 core value was a customer obsession. For them, this
means using technology to improve the client experience. If you
mold your agency with these shared values, you will emerge as
an industry leader in this decade and beyond.
Klusas: Technology both simplifies and complicates our business. I
have seen successful producers use technology to broaden their
reach and expand their distribution network to focus on selling
and advising clients, and once a buying decision is made, use
technology to very quickly get the client covered with a policy.
Technology also provides a mixed blessing of providing any
information consumers could want, almost too much, where
one could get bogged down, like picking out a paint color with
a thousand shades of blue or green. I still believe most people
want the “advising” in person or over the phone to inform or
even confirm that the product would solve their problem.
Leibow: The interoperability between disparate systems continues
to grow. We are seeing CRMs or quoting tools can integrate with
an eApp platform. It doesn’t have to be an end-to-end solution
with the same carrier or vendor platforms.
Ross: The biggest
challenge agents
will have during this
pandemic is not using
the technology… it’s
optimizing it.
Mind behind the machine
Sladek: While eApps and online resources may have grown over
the years, all we have really done is taken an antiquated process
and made it electronic. Our processes need to go through a
metamorphous not just an evolution. Although I think the
new automated UW systems will help to fix some of this going
forward, the real advancement will come when we change our
mindset about the data we collect and make a decision on that
data in real time.
Wickersham: Technology has decreased the cost to do business
as we have learned that almost everyone can work remotely for
extended periods of time. The flipside of these improvements
is the additional risks and ways that need to be implemented
to help mitigate them. We can no longer rely on just anti-virus
software, but now need VPNs, encrypted data storage and much
more significant password security to protect our clients and
their personal information. These are costs that we didn’t even
imagine 10 years ago but sits front and center in our minds now.
Garcia: Though we are working with a more educated consumer
due to the internet and the multitude of direct-to-consumer
applications, many surveys indicate that consumers, while
researching online, would still rather purchase insurance
from an advisor. From a processing standpoint, drop tickets,
algorithmic underwriting, electronic health records, etc are all
making business processes more efficient and giving both the
agent and the consumer a better experience while creating
efficiencies for the BGA\IMO and the carriers.
Way forward
Pinney: Technology has empowered agents and BGAs who
were able to quickly switch their operations from a traditional
face-to-face model to a virtual one. We were fortunate to have
been early adopters of online tools, and lucky to have had a
mobile app for agents almost ready for release when COVID-19
restrictions started. This, along with our direct-to-consumer
distribution model and emphasis on agents who operate in a
similar fashion, has allowed us to gain market share while many
of our peers initially struggled.
Fortunately, I think the best BGAs – even those who weren’t
as digitally savvy at the beginning of the pandemic — were able
to rapidly transition and adopt these tools. Most of the carriers
were also able to transition to a wider array of submission
options, non-med solutions, and accelerated underwriting
processes. Overall, I see the industry in a better place today
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