The insurance industry has focused heavily on supporting vulnerable customers throughout the past 18 months, but one director says it needs to develop a closer understanding of the realities of customer vulnerability - particularly those dealing with serious illness and injury.
Medical Assurance Society (MAS) independent director Suzanne Wolton said that from her personal experience, vulnerable customers are often a lot more vulnerable than insurance companies think. She said it took a job outside of the insurance sector for her to fully appreciate this, and, as such, insurers could be offering a more “empathetic product” to their customers.
“I brought a retail shop that provides wigs and hair pieces to women going through chemotherapy, and I had that while working in the insurance industry,” Wolton said.
“I realised that my focus in insurance had been around doing the job as quickly as I could, meeting my targets, managing people and getting everything done. But in this job, I saw people every day who may have found out the day before that they have cancer and that they need chemotherapy, and I learned more about empathy, about forming connections with people and how to talk to people than I ever did in insurance.”
“If you can get some sense of how to be really empathetic and how to really listen to people, I think the industry would benefit from that,” she explained.
“Our vulnerable customers are much more vulnerable than I ever thought they were. Getting a sense of people’s vulnerability is really important, and we could really do that as an industry. We would have a much more empathetic product to offer.”
Wolton said that to fully appreciate a customer’s situation and vulnerability, insurers should increase their efforts to listen to those customers, and also to work more closely with regulators. She said New Zealand’s insurers are “really lucky” that its regulators are willing to engage closely with them, and encouraged them to take advantage of events such as those hosted by ICNZ.
“If you think about it, insurance was designed to be the ultimate empathetic expression of finance,” Wolton said.
“It is a pooling of money for the many supporting the few. Often on comment boards, I see companies trying to manage their way out of that issue, but if we want to create effective, empathetic networks with our customers, then we have to not be defensive about that. We need to say: “we’ll take this, and have a look about it.”
“The other thing we can do is network with our regulators, and we’re really lucky with our regulators in New Zealand,” she added. “They’re very receptive to listening and understanding our industry, and what ICNZ does with having regular forums is a great way for the regulators and us to learn about each other. We need to keep that going, because the more we can collaborate with our regulators, the better our industry will be.”
