Recognize that confusing terms and strange ways can contribute to customer dissatisfaction with insurance
Mike Uth (Progressive) welcomes attendees to Progressive and explains that ours is an industry that can be difficult to understand.
“Like most of you, I wasn’t always an insurance geek,” Uth quipped. “I started out in the trucking business – local trucking, loading and unloading. I can tell you that one defining feature of the trucking business is that most of the people who work in it have a very simple, and often quite colorful, form of communication.”
Uth noted that after moving from the trucking business to insurance, communication got a lot less simple.
“We have strange words,” he said. “We produce, underwrite, rate, place and bind. We don’t raise prices, we ‘take rate.’ We don’t provide you with a description of your coverages. We give you a ‘declarations page,’ which sounds like something John Hancock might have signed.
“It gets better,” he said. “When you have a claim, we don’t just pay it. We ‘adjust’ it, often to a number the consumer doesn’t agree with. We ’sign’ and ‘countersign’ documents, which makes you wonder whether one cancels out the other. And we don’t have people. We have producers, brokers, appraisers, sub-producers, public adjusters and other mysterious people working in the background. Then, there’s the reinsurance industry, a strange world that sometimes seems like a remote tribe of hobbits.”
If insurance people ran the trucking business…?
Uth speculated what the trucking industry would look like if it was run by the insurance industry.
“Chances are we would not have drivers anymore,” he said. “We would have ‘vehicular motor producers.’ Company drivers would be ‘captive VMPs.’ A local trucker would be a ‘vehicular sub-producer.’ Long-haul drivers would require a different license in every state. People unloading trucks would be ‘vehicular content location adjusters.’
“What I am trying to emphasize is just how complicated, confusing and frustrating insurance can be to the consumer,” Uth said. “They’re frustrated and they feel a bit like captives themselves, which is why one of the most important things we can do to drive a new culture of customer service is simply to demonstrate a willingness to listen. That and the ability to accept criticism. If we want to really encourage change, we need to really make an effort to speak in a language that customers understand.”
Regulators can help just by listening
Speaking to the regulators in attendance, Uth noted that insurance law can be just as complicated and difficult to understand as anything that companies do.
“Listen to the complaints of consumers and you will hear the level of confusion and frustration in their voices,” Uth said. “Even when a complaint is without merit or the company has acted properly, we need to understand how confusing and frustrating this industry can be to the average person.
“We’re all in the same boat when it comes to building a culture of customer care,” Uth said. “Together, we have the power to bring about the next revolution in customer care.”
