The recent
Insurance Business roundtable on ‘
Broker Tools – Driving Efficiencies,’ sparked a lively debate on just what it is that brokers are looking for to compete effectively in the market.
At one point, the discussion turned to where brokers can most effectively spend their dollars on marketing and new technology – and compared it to how captive agents and directs conduct business.
Bill Morris, President of Navicom Inc.:
As brokers, you have said with limited funds that you are trying to keep everybody happy with limited funds. The future means having to reallocate resources away from doing stuff that customers don’t care about to where current customer appetites are. It sounds like you’re dinosaurs, right? You can’t work in real time, and its restricting brokers from spending the time and effort to properly follow up and build relationships.
Tim Currie, Vice President, Personal Lines, Navigators Insurance Brokers Ltd.:
It’s a broker problem, because it’s not a belairdirect problem, it’s not a TD problem. Everything is so streamlined and if we were able to take some of the cost out of that portion of it for us as a broker, yeah, we could invest more in marketing; we could invest more in technology; we could invest more in training. And that would help level the playing field, because that was an absolute shock for me going from the broker side of the business to the direct writer side of business: how simple it was to do business – not to mention the underwriters and the sales guys are on the same team. You didn’t have to sell it three times.
Morris: There’s a reason why the agents, captive agents in Canada, until recently have had the most loyal customers because they have the simplest business model, right? And they can spend that extra time and they do, right?
Currie: Yeah.
Morris: And the other irony in all of this – in the true role of ‘broker,’ you should represent the whole market; but fully 60 percent of the market in Canada apparently doesn’t care because they’re buying from single markets, right? So at the end of the day, you might not be able to have a solution for everybody. One of the decisions you may have to make as a broker is to simply say, ‘Screw it, I’m only going to have three,’ and know that your partnership with those three companies are such that they’re not going to drop you.
Currie: And hope
Intact doesn’t buy two of them.
Morris: That could be a problem too, right? But even if you went from eight to four that solves your problem, right? So again, these are the kinds of things you have to think about – that it’s back to customer centricity. What do customers care about?
Keep the debate moving forward. What do your customers care about? Tell us by leaving a comment below.
