What if? These words are impacting the landscape of today’s insurance brokerages. Faced with challenges from a myriad of angles, “What if,” is shaping the direction of insurance company pressures, client expectations, and the technological and procedural evolution of today’s broker.
What if is a question so much easier asked today than it was 20 years ago. Just go right ahead and type “What if…,” into your Google machine and you will receive a seemingly limitless (about 4,300,000,000 results) amount of fact and opinion guiding you to the inevitable destination your question is taking you.
What if we outsource this part of our process? What if we hire this individual? What if we subcontract this or that? What if I just buy this product online? What if we forgo protecting ourselves with that coverage? What if we push more responsibility on our client? What if they push back? What if we pay them less? What if we charge them more?
The answers to these questions and the infinite additional inquiries are the daily challenges that our business (not unlike so many others) faces every day. There was a time when we were not expected to know the answer to each of these questions. Today, you need to know or find out and you better do it quickly. It is 2016. Information is prevalent, moves at blurring speeds, and whether correct or not, shapes opinions and the information seeker’s next move instantaneously.
So what is an insurance broker to do in this not so new, but ever-changing world? Do the same thing we always have? Provide a product and a reactive service to our client needs? Throw our hands up and blame the difficult insurance companies? Dismiss our clients for being overly demanding? Respond to financial constraints by eliminating one more job and spreading the responsibility across the entire team? Sell out and do something easier?
NO!
We adapt. We innovate. We seek to absorb the challenges of increased expectations by insurance companies. After all, we are the entrepreneurs. We are educated. We are nimble. We rise in the face of increased expectation from our clients. Through technological and procedural change we can exceed client expectations and do it consistently. We embrace the speed of information. We educate our workforce on the ways to harness the power of data. We train our teams to understand more than the just the products we sell. We seek to further understand our client needs, often times finding solutions before our clients know they have a problem. We overcome.
What if we just did that?
