Insurance. Experience. Change!

Pakistan is an interesting market. And for Insurance sector, it’s full of contradictions.

To be honest, Insurance products for masses are relatively new to the region. However, the new customer has enormously high expectations for fast and simple digital services.

For insurance executives and leadership teams, that means keeping two things in balance. Massive Awareness and Mighty-Easy, Convenient, Cheap and Reliable Access.

That is, the companies need to deliver flawlessly on the basics. Yet, also needs to be thinking constantly about how their offerings can measure up to digital natives in a region where these platforms rule.

I’ve worked with insurance companies in past, and it actually depresses me how many of them compete amongst each other. In a country, where literally more than 90% of the businesses and individuals are NOT COVERED, competition is simply a lack of vision or compulsive constipation.

Traditionally, insurance have been a heavily paper-reliant business. Most of the operations and interactions [internal and external] rely on paper. This is still true because insurance somehow [unfortunately] is a low-interaction business. You buy a policy, you have a series of intense meetings with an agent, then you sign a bunch of papers, and then you pay once a year for the entire term. And so, papers still are cool.

In the world of today, no frequent interactions leads to irrelevant. Here is the scary part now. This must lead insurance companies to build a digital ecosystem or infrastructure that allows them to frequently and easily interact with their customers whilst also receiving information and data from customers which will allow them to fine-tune their experiences.

My instant suggestion: get inspired from telecom operators and kind of freedom they offer, even in designing their own bundle.

Insurance sector need design thinking and a complete innovation DNA makeover here. If I have to break it down further, I’d say we must look at it from different filters. Have a group of people that look at on-boarding — or “search and buy”. Then, have a group of people looking at “manage and review,” which is basically servicing. Then, the all-important — group of people that are looking at claims, which is the moment of credibility for any insurance company.

Having an app is not going to help, until the entire ecosystem is aligned digitally.

This demands breaking down the organizational barriers. Life insurance not interested in Banca, General Insurance least bothered about growth in Life business, etc. Their need to be one focus — CUSTOMER. The idea is to build an experience for customer that is now predictable across all products.

Here what I am proposing is a complete re-imagination. When we have different people responsible for different products and different people responsible for different channels, even with their best intentions in mind, because they are working in isolation, what they create will be by definition, different.

While discussing my thoughts with a seasoned Insurance leader, I got a question: “Why is it that I need to reorganize? All these people know that they’re all working for the company. Customer is our top priority anyways and our value wall also says so!

I am sure, few readers by now must be thinking that they are already doing what I am proposing. So, what was different once you reorganized?

Well, here is my bit.

One is that the definition of insanity is repeating the same behavior expecting a different result. Just telling people to “do exactly what you’re doing, but now it all has to be about a great customer experience” — it’s just not going to work because we all, as human beings, have this reflex.

Try asking a life insurance agent some benefits of bancassurance and get ready for a fun-ride!

Let me make my point clearer. It’s the same people doing the job with completely new set of capabilities. It’s beyond traditional product knowledge. It’s understanding of Agile working methodologies, human-centered design, journey mapping, NPS, etc.

The biggest job of leadership is to explain EVERYONE that they are actually much more important in the organization and that the organization wants to give a role and a skill set that will accelerate their career beyond their imagination.

This may change something which is called fundamental in traditional insurance companies. The size of portfolio and team will no longer determine how important a person is.

This shift is perhaps the biggest barriers for so-called insurance biggies to enter in digital mainstream.

Few concluding action items for my readers from insurance organizations:

• Hire digital natives;
• Hire from other industries;
• Re-consider the compensation model;
• Re-imagine sales. Calling someone in middle of a meeting to inform that you have new investment, education or other forms of insurance in non-courteous, ridiculous, damaging and a kind of assurance that the person will not buy insurance from you;
• Hate paper; reduce it as much as you can. Make a KPI around use of paper;
• Train EVERYONE on future skills and customer experience;
• Punish mediocre success, Reward excellence failure.

I must say… one should not underestimate change. Think through the change carefully and plan through it. This is not about telling the same people to work in the same way but come to work wearing jeans with a smile. There is much more!