As of this week, several areas in the UK find themselves in the grip of a local lockdown. And while these new measures are being rolled out locally at the moment, the nationwide impact should not fall under the radar as the daunting prospect of a second wave of the COVID-19 virus remains a viable possibility.
The question for many insurance brokers now is what they can do to prepare for any potential second wave and Toby MacLachlan (pictured), the MD of Ignite Systems, a policy management system for insurance brokers and MGAs, recently outlined some key ways businesses can prepare for an ever-more uncertain future. Essential to keep in mind, he noted, is that the pandemic does not necessarily have to affect the whole of society to impact a brokerage very quickly.
Even if just 20% of a small brokerage’s staff take ill at the same time, then it does not matter whether the infection is localised or part of a national second wave, he said, and so it is good practice for brokers to start putting the right business continuity measures in place now. Ignite now works with over 30 broker clients throughout the UK and, having started in insurance broking himself, MacLachlan noted that during the recent lockdown, when margins were squeezed, the focus of broking businesses becomes drawn to what they do best, where they add value and where they make money.
“Brokers want to be selling more add-on products, writing more business more profitably, and reducing their admin burden,” he said. “That’s why brokers are starting to look at new systems to help them do just that. During the first two to three months of lockdown, we were just focused on being as supportive as possible of our customer base as they were all going through various levels of turmoil, depending on the systems they had in place and their ability to get their people working from home.
“But now the dust has settled, we’ve signed more new contracts in the last two months than we had in the entire year before that. And I think that’s because a lot of brokers have now established this new business as normal where there’s going to be a bit more working from home. And, due to the possibility that there might be a second wave, they’re preparing for that by looking at their systems and saying ‘right, what can we actually do to get ourselves off the ground and to make sure our phones don’t have messages saying, ‘due to COVID you’re going to be waiting for 10 minutes to speak to someone?’”
During a pandemic, there’s a lot of goodwill when it comes to poor customer service as people understand that businesses are struggling, MacLachlan said, but if there’s a second wave, people will expect brokers and other businesses to have got their act together and be much better prepared. This is what Ignite is helping its brokers do because, with the right tools in place, a second wave does not have to have a catastrophic impact on business continuity.
“Changing your systems in response to COVID is not something you’re going to achieve by this winter, but there are things you can do that will help you,” he said. “For example, Ignite has a standalone chatbot that we’ve implemented within a number of our broker clients and these sit on their websites and answers queries from their customers. And if it can’t answer the query, it will direct the customer to a live chat or phone number, but over 50% of inquiries at the moment are being answered by this. That’s obviously a huge reduction in what would have otherwise been simple questions answered by call centre staff.”
MacLachlan highlighted that integrations such as these can take just a couple of weeks to achieve while a whole system migration would take months, and these are the sorts of solutions which brokers should be looking at right now. Even if it’s just small step at first, brokers should be looking to embrace these opportunities because, whether or not there is a second wave, these solutions are about making the business more efficient and allowing brokers to focus on the areas where they can lend true value.
