The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of digital literacy in insurance brokerages. Those with greater digital skills and awareness were able to adapt quicker to the remote working demands of the pandemic than the more old-school firms with “in person” set in stone above their client-facing retail shops.
One independent insurance brokerage to adapt to the so-called “new normal” with relative ease was Alteri Insurance Brokers (Alteri), based in Vancouver. Founder, president and CEO Joshua Krenus (pictured) attributes his firm’s success partly to its youth – the brokerage is only three years old – and its operational flexibility.
Prior to the pandemic, Alteri was already running “a rotating door policy,” explained Krenus, meaning that producers had access to the brokerage’s downtown facility and resources as and when they wanted. When the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, and the province of British Columbia declared a public health emergency soon after, it didn’t require a huge operation for Alteri employees to work from home on a more permanent basis.
“We’re a young brokerage – I started Alteri in 2017 – and we’re very nimble,” said Krenus. “As CEO, I don’t have to go through people to make decisions and get things done. From that perspective, our switch to remote working was really seamless and easy. We’ve always used technology like Slack to communicate among team members, and COVID-19 has actually increased our volume of communication, and the clarity and efficiency of that communication. When it was time for everyone to work from home, I made the announcement through Slack, told everyone to collect the equipment they needed, and everybody was totally on board.
“One thing I will say is that the efficiency and productivity from our brokers working from home skyrocketed. I don’t know if that was because some of them were worried - we weren’t sure how the insurance industry was going to be affected by COVID, and therefore, not sure if the brokerage (i.e. me) was going to keep those brokers on board. Nonetheless, our number of written policies and volume of premium - everything went up. For me, it showcased that you don’t really need to be in the office, and also that the stigma of people being too distracted when working from home doesn’t prove true.”
Regarding communication with clientele, Krenus said that wasn’t impacted much either by the public health crisis. Alteri has never been a client-facing retail shop, and so, most of its day-to-day client communication even prior to the pandemic was done via phone, email and video meetings. The brokerage is also paperless, meaning that all of its policy documents are sent out digitally, and everything is kept on the cloud. Krenus commented: “Nothing really changed in that regard. There’s no way our clients would have known we were working from home unless we told them.”
While he’s a young leader open to flexible working arrangements and digital tools, Krenus admits he did have some quite “rigid” old-school practices that he will now look to tweak post-COVID. In an effort to create a strong company culture, he used to ask that all employees attend the office in-person at least once or twice a week just to check in and see the team.
“Seeing what’s happened with COVID, and the response, the efficiency and the productivity that the team has managed to maintain, I would totally disregard my rigid stance on that now,” the CEO told Insurance Business. “I don’t believe it’s necessary to be coming into the office if you don’t feel like you need to. Even myself personally, I’m going to be working a lot more remotely, because it just makes way more sense from an efficiency stance. A lot of us are coming in from the Valley and the North Shore, and if they can start their day off by shaving an hour, that just makes sense to me.”
Moving forward, Krenus hopes to build on Alteri’s advantages that have proved so fruitful through the COVID-19 pandemic. He said: “A lot of older-school brokerages have never used much technology or software like Slack before, and they’re not used to working remotely. Some are really struggling with client communication, with distribution of their policies, and with their own internal systems - so I think there’s a tremendous opportunity in this market for younger companies, such as Alteri, who are familiar with such internal communication systems and software, to capture that business and let those people move on. We’ll be really aggressive in the next few months leading up to the end of the year, both in finding and retaining new talent for the agency, as well as trying to acquire new agencies - ones that are putting their hands up and need some help.”
