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The number of techy tools that brokers have access to in their toolbox is growing as broker management systems include more and more features, technology vendors offer solutions that allow for the analysis of data coming in from carriers, and insurers plan out brokerage environments of the future that are focused on the customer experience.
Not all technology will prove to be useful to brokers, at least not at the outset when these tools are still being honed, and some will fail to be adopted widely – one only has to look at Segways to realize that technology is not always as transformative as it promises. In the case of one brokerage, chatbots were that tech tool that didn’t quite take off.
“We were one of the brokerages experimenting with chatbots and we never really got to a point where it was there for us to go all in on them,” said John McClelland, broker and director of digital for McClelland Insurance, and founder of miBroker, adding that it wasn’t a complete enough solution. While the firm’s experiments involved using chatbots for lead generation, the next piece of the puzzle was missing. “If [the customer] wants the insurance, can you sell it to them that way, and that step is not there at all. We didn’t think it was worth the time, effort and money to have basically a rating engine, and then a person would still have to phone in during business hours and talk to a broker to get a policy issued.”
While chatbots seem gimmicky to McClelland in their current iteration, he still sees potential down the line in how they could integrate into a brokerage’s business processes – they’re just not ready for primetime right now, he told Insurance Business. Some of the technology that is already making waves in the broking world includes the newfangled versions of broker management systems and the new ways of reaching customers today.
“You’ve seen a lot more brokers looking seriously at their legacy systems and upgrading those systems. Some brokers that would say to me two years ago that their legacy systems were fine for what they needed to do, they’re now the ones saying, we’re working on data warehouses and we’re working on having a proper CRM that manages all of this data for us,” said McClelland. “I think brokerages have also been embracing different communication channels, and I think that’s going fairly well. People want to talk with text message or live chat on a website – those are things that brokers are able to respond to now and it gives the customer a better experience.”
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are also helping out behind the scenes as real timesavers, explained the broker.
“For example, a lot of offices have to have an administration person help attach some of the downloads that are coming in from the companies each day. Some of these systems are smart enough now that they can attach those automatically. They’re smart enough to go find the client file and to read the name of the insured on the file and match the two of those up,” said McClelland, who sees AI and machine learning bringing the ‘bionic broker’ to life in the near future.
“We’ve got tons of information that we’re responsible for that’s hidden away in some of these company manuals and it can take a while to go find that information for a broker, so if you had a Google or a Siri for that kind of information, I think that could really empower brokers to be able to get some of those answers quicker and provide better customer service.”
