Providing the right insurance solutions to their clients quickly is a concern for many personal lines brokers, especially as consumers expect the same fast and reliable service from their insurers as they get from the Amazons and Ubers of the world.
“We received a lot of really good feedback from brokers that their needs were changing and we recognize that, and we needed to evolve our service offerings,” said Debbie Boich (pictured), Aviva Canada‘s VP of underwriting operations, adding that through the course of getting to understand brokers’ needs, two key areas where having dedicated teams would help came up. “One is a dedicated underwriting team which is responsible for making underwriting exceptions outside of the brokers’ binding authority, and the other dedicated team that we’ve created is more of a technical expert who can assist brokers not with underwriting exceptions, but general inquiries to help them through navigating our systems, understanding our processes, and understanding our products.”
Those aren’t the only important features of Aviva Connex. It was also crucial for the insurer to embed at the frontlines a culture of ownership.
“What this means is that the broker interacts with the same underwriter at Aviva on a file from start to finish. Really owning the file was important to brokers because they didn’t want to hear that they had to call back multiple times on the same file and talk to different people and recite their problem or question again,” explained Boich. “Now, you remain with that underwriter through the course of the entire file.”
The last service offering from Aviva is centered around how brokers interact with the company. For one, Aviva expanded its communication channels to include web chat.
“Right from their system, they can press a button and interact with an underwriter – and that is a real-time response – and get their problem or question or underwriting file resolved through web chat,” said Boich. “It’s within the broker’s control and they can decide how they want to use this.”
Meanwhile, the automated callback feature enables brokers to keep their spot in the queue if there’s a large volume of calls. Once their underwriter becomes available again, the system will call the broker back.
“Lastly is voicemail. All of our underwriters have voicemail and if the broker would like to leave a message for the underwriter that they’re dealing with, they now have the ability to do so, so [all of] that provides them with choice,” said Boich.
With speed being an important component of the customer experience, and the pressure to meet expectations rising as personal lines brokers and their clients see many challenges in the marketplace, brokers want to be able to deliver solutions to insureds quickly and easily.
“We heard from brokers that, especially for personal lines, they want it fast, they want it easy, and they want to be able to get back to their customers quickly,” said Boich, adding that with Aviva Connex, the company is “delivering choice in terms of the channel in which they want to interact with us, and a faster response with their question so that they can get back to their personal lines customer faster.”
