When Should You Pull the Plug?

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One of our professional colleagues who shall remain unnamed shared an email with us the other day that qualified as the written equivalent of a cold call, and an inappropriate one at that. This is what it said:

Dear Sir,

I tried to call you, but you didn’t pick up. Because I didn’t want you to miss out, I’m sending you a transcript of how our call would have gone.

You: Hello.

Me: Hi. I’m calling from Cirrus MegaSystems, developer of thinware for insurance. Can I steal 2 minutes?

You: What do you want?

Me: We replace aging and inadequate core systems to modernize operations and improve the policyholder experience.

You: Well, we’re in the middle of implementing another system.

Me: Since you’re a customer of Amerisurica Worldwide, I thought their bad reputation might compel you to jump ship.

You: Things haven’t yet gotten ….

Me: A lot of Amerisurica customers are in the same boat. Cirrus MegaSystems would be a perfect fit for you.

You: I’m not ready to begin looking at other alternatives yet.

Me: Let’s schedule a demo anyway. It’s never to early to begin developing another plan in case things don’t work out.

Say what you want about the guy who wrote that email, but he was persistent. And he definitely put the cold in cold call.

Numbers Don’t Lie

We know the reality. Almost 40 percent of our new customers over the past four years came to us after failed or failing implementations. There are reasons for those failures, of course — a lack of defined goals, under-estimations of the effort, the resources, and the time required, and many more. And those reasons suggest there needs to be higher degrees of cognizance and vigilance about whether and when to find another vendor before more good time and money gets thrown after bad, before you burn through your budgets and the patience of your Board, and before heads start rolling.

You can’t allow vendors to stuff themselves down your throat. But at the point at which you start to sense trouble with an implementation, start preparing to pull the plug. And make sure you have a Plan B.

The company or the job you save may be your own.

(Inter)Mediating Claims

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Back at the turn of the century, with Y2K behind us and a new millennium of technology ahead, we were hearing the term, disintermediation, quite a bit. The prevailing assumption was that technology and e-commerce (remember e-commerce?) would replace the agents from which people had theretofore purchased insurance. Even as late as February of 2015, Insurance Business America proclaimed, “One in four insurance agents will be gone by 2018.” It would appear that prognostication hasn’t exactly borne out. And it’s a pretty safe bet the Big “I” didn’t get the memo. But we’re not wading into that particular debate.

Rather, we’d like to share some surprising (at least to us) statistics from Forrester’s Consumer Technographics® North American Healthcare Topic Insights 2 Survey, 2019 (US), in which 4,699 US adults were surveyed online. More specifically, we want to share findings in four different claims-related activities. Here they are:

  1. When filing a claim 41 percent of respondents said they use digital self-service tools. The other 59 percent preferred to work with a person.
  2. When checking the status of a claim, 61 percent used digital self-service tools, while 39 percent preferred to work with a person.
  3. To check the status of a payment, 74 percent used digital self-service tools, while just 26 percent sought the information from a person.
  4. To dispute a transaction, only 32 percent of respondents used digital self-service tools, while 68 percent sought the help of a person.

Given that evidence, it appears that most people are increasingly comfortable with going online to file, check, and verify payment of their claims. But they clearly don’t want to be disintermediated from their money.

What’s the Upshot?

It’s often said that insurance constitutes the selling of a promise; that is, the insurer (or, in this case, the agent), by way of contract (the policy), is selling the promise of making the policyholder whole in the event of a loss. As it pertains to the contract and the mechanics of its fulfillment, folks are getting accustomed to our bold new technological world. And when it comes to providing information to all parties to claims transactions (insurers, agents, and policyholders), we’ll put our software up against anyone’s. But if a policyholder has a beef with a claims transaction, somebody better be by the phone.

Disintermediation? Not quite yet.