9 Comments 9 Commentsby Jon-Paul Hale
Levels have fallen so much so that I'm getting clients emailing me about the appalling service levels of their providers when they try and do something by themselves.
This usually comes with questions about the quality of their cover and the likelihood of it working or responding.
For clients, this isn't necessarily an incorrect assumption, given that lack of service in other industries is directly indicative of something not working, like retail service, a telco, or a power company.
We have seen Fidelity Life come out falling on its sword and Southern Cross swinging, claiming it has "communicated with the market" despite the lack of evidence to the contrary.
nib recently apologised for its systems and service issues.
An employee of another insurer told me that a significant proportion of its staff has been with it for less than 12 months.
Resolution Life has had issues that still need improvement, but significantly improved from their merger service levels.
Accuro has been the pits with its cyber issue and new systems, too.
And the rest have had their issues with service levels around either timeframes, or accuracy of processing in recent times.
What gets me is that this isn't a new thing; it's been going on since Covid-19, and it's been getting worse.
I understand that finding and retaining staff is challenging; this has been signalled across all industries, but it's never been as bad as it is now.
What's the answer?
More money. More money on coherent working systems as well as wages. And yes, that will likely increase premiums, too, because they want to maintain profit margins.
Here's the thing: An operationally efficient business will automatically have better margins through reduced rework. The average policy change for one of my clients currently requires three attempts by the insurer to get it right.
Something has to change because the way it is, is not working presently and seriously undermines consumer confidence that the policies they have and the premiums they are paying will work as intended and expected.
One thing I have been unsurprised with, but it is still appalling, is the lack of documented processes in most insurer businesses. So much so that new staff from other insurers often don't follow that insurer's process, making the whole thing worse.
Talking to senior people across the industry, I'm surprised that there is a lack of operational documentation in our insurers, and I'm not surprised staff have a hard time getting things right as a result.
I was looking back over an old Sovereign adviser guide (6.3), and this was pretty good; it had a substantial level of operational procedures that were provided to the adviser and has since been removed.
I don't remember the 7.0 post-Colonial merger version having as much detail in it, so that may have gone west quite early in my time in the industry.
Out here in Adviser Land, we're expected to have not only good documentation of client interaction but operational processes for the business; at the same time, I'm seeing insurers lacking in most of these areas.
It raises the question of how to improve one's work without a measuring stick.
The idea that the outgoing person can train the incoming one has always been flawed, yet we still insist on this approach and are surprised when there are problems.
Sure, documenting things is boring, and maintaining things once created can be difficult; this is fundamentally why ISO standards were created. Business documentation and quality assurance that sits around it.
Most businesses won't look at ISO certifications because of the paperwork. Umm... that's the point: doing the paperwork to document the business operation to ensure it is accurate, consistent, and, better yet, able to be qualitatively improved.
We have the FMA looking at complaint registers and client documentation as the panacea for measuring adviser business compliance, when the reality is the client documentation comes from effective operational systems that ensure things get done the way they should Every. Single. Time.
When the documentation of my business for insurer processes exceeds the knowledge of the insurer staff of a process, we have a problem.
It's good that the average honest adviser has this level of understanding. The problem is that insurer staff mess the process up by asking for irrelevant things, not communicating with the right people, or, in the case I talked about with nominated beneficiaries recently, exposing them to fraud and loss.
What's my point?
Staff, insurer staff.
If you recruit into a company with poor process documentation and operational efficiency, you're setting your staff up for failure.
This sort of avoidable failure destroys morale and ultimately impacts staff well-being to the point that they either feel like failures and leave or are berated so much that, because of fear, they fail to take the initiative when needed to solve problems.
This is a top-down issue and one that insurer management needs to get their heads around and get behind. Otherwise, we're on a burning plane headed for a mountain, and that's not what is intended here.
We've had three years of an exceptional operating environment; we need to stop stretching people and get on with adjusting to business as usual (BAU) because what we have to deal with is now BAU, and it's never going back to what we had pre-2020.
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Unfortunately some insurers are suffering badly from legacy systems, young staff with no strong motivation or adequate leadership. Working from home expectations and hallucinations of what work should look like. This is unfortunately indulged by several insurers who are attempting to be modern and woke.
I do feel the CEO's of several are amazingly out of touch and have not understood our frustration in attempting to assist existing clients with small enquiries. I was told by one insurer these enquiries on an existing plan now take 13 working days before a response. this is incredibly unacceptable.
Then we see the same CEO's handing out some type of excellence awards to advisers (that like this recognition) whilst that same CEO is operating a mediocre business.
Some may recall years ago when Sun Alliance had a service turn around guarantee where they would pay an adviser $50 if they did not turn an enquiry around in their benchmark time frame.
My strong view is CEO's (yes them, not line managers) should now really get problem solving an make service benchmarks and turn arounds this years focus. Get public, let us know you exist and are aware and stand up and get it fixed. Its during times like this they need to front foot, not hide internally busy with god knows what. Time to earn that salary!
It is top down and I strongly believe the CEO, not an Operations Manager or other Manager needs to come forward. Their picture in the emails, newsletters, GR interviews. Otherwise, I do not believe they are concerned or know how bad it has become.