Are you asking the wrong questions?

How can you get the answers you need from customers if you’re asking them the wrong questions? The answer of course, is that you can’t. So then, how do you know what questions you should be asking? That answer, comes in the form of data.

The insurance industry needs to utilise data to become more flexible towards clients and to highlight its value, an expert has said.

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Speaking at the 2017 NIBA Convention, which kicked-off in Sydney yesterday, Jason Clarke, executive general manager - intermediary distribution at QBE, said that the industry needs to become more flexible to mirror client needs.

“Customer expectations are for us to be vastly more flexible,” Clarke said. “Unfortunately, our industry rates customers or charges for customers on a pretty vanilla basis. We are still not getting to the level of charging one customer business to another [business] because of the question sets we ask.”

As such, he suggests the industry use data as a way to tailor and create solutions that are “vastly more personalised to the client.” The idea of a more flexible insurance industry is also critical to ensuring that clients are given true value, regardless of how they interact with the industry, Clarke said.

Elsewhere, Clarke highlighted the importance of offering true value for money. Commissions are constantly under the microscope and that scrutiny is only going to increase as cheaper direct offerings emerge.

“The industry is going to come under a lot more scrutiny on that [commissions] in the years to come so if we are not delivering that value, they [clients] will choose a distribution source where they think they are getting that value,” Clarke said.

There is still a role for brokers however, as long as clients feel they are given the correct advice.

“I think that distribution source needs to be there and be varied,” Clarke continued. “As long as we are giving advice to that end client, I see the broking industry growing vastly more than it is today, because they are giving that value.”


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