It was the event none of us saw coming, but few will ever forget – the COVID-19 pandemic has changed lives to a previously unimaginable extent over the last year, with some adapting to the “new normal” better than others.
One sector to earn praise is the claims industry, with Jeremy Trott, non-executive director of the Society of Claims Professionals, noting that it had shown an “incredible amount of intuition and entrepreneurship.”
Trott, describing the pandemic as being something similar to what you’d expect to read of in a film script, commented that COVID-19 had driven new methods of remote working, as well as the minefield of business interruption claims. Yet through it all, Trott believes that individuals and businesses have shone to support their customer and employee base.
“That included the changes that a number of insurers made to recognise additional activities that businesses need to do to stay afloat – for example, restaurants becoming takeaways, taxi companies turning to delivering food – and more generally, support for any humanitarian work that individuals were taking on,” he said.
“Most of this, insurers automatically covered from the various insurance angles, as well as offering their own employees different and varied ways of keeping in touch, with a particular focus on mental wellbeing.
“Gradually, during the summer, things started to return to some kind of normal, with offices starting to open up and the wider customer base also trying to make sense of what it meant to work during a pandemic. As usual, an incredible amount of intuition and entrepreneurship enabled an uptick in activity that was showing real promise until the first tiered approach was followed by another lockdown.
“The advantage this time is that outside the hospitality and retail sectors, most businesses have remained open, with lessons learned from the first lockdown being fed into solutions to enable both customers and employees to remain safe.”
Now, Trott believes lessons have been learned and the industry is ready to take on further challenges in the future.
“We might initially fail but this is often the way we learn the most; and to seek perfection at the first attempt is rarely possible and often restricts progress in the long run,” he said.
“As we go into 2021, there is still a considerable amount of uncertainty that we need to deal with – and my advice would be that we are just going to need to get more comfortable dealing with that uncertainty, rather than trying to change it.”
