The customer service conundrum for brokers – how do you showcase your knowledge and expertise to a generational group that doesn’t want to listen?
“The future of any business is always the next generation,” says Bill Morris, president of Navicom. “But this is a generation that may not fully appreciate the value of relationships. They don’t know any different. They are saying to their parents: ‘I love you, but frankly, I don’t want to do business the way you do,’ because they see their parents as dinosaurs.”
For brokers, the frustration in reaching out to this next generation is the unwillingness to conduct business in the traditional way.
“When you say that you know the broker and they can bring some value to the table, they don’t really hear that,” says Morris. “It is like, ‘they want me to go see the guy; they want me to sign something, they want to be my friend.’ Their attitude is, ‘Hello! I don’t want to be friends with someone that I need something from. You are trying to potentially sell them something that they don’t want at this point, and don’t fully appreciate.”
The explosion of the internet and the dynamic shift by Generation Y and Millennials to going online first to find insurance solutions is making brokers rethink what directs are doing right.
“We all talk about you won’t get service as a Direct Writer,” says Rick Dresher, president of Affiliated Insurance Management Inc. in Oakville, Ont. “So with this one client, I went on to belairedirect (insurance) to get quotes; I did the homeowner’s quote, put in my cell phone number, and within a half hour I got a call from belairedirect saying, ‘You didn’t fill in a couple of things that would have got you additional discounts. Can I walk you through that?’”
Morris says that if Generation Y and Millennials fully understood the ins and outs of insurance, “then they might understand the difference a broker can make.” (continued.)
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Easier said than done, as undercutting this is any effort by brokers describe all the things that they can do for a client usually gets the reaction of “boring.”
What Gen Ys and Millennials want is 24/7 service when they want it; and they want it simple.
“And then, they may need some other things which currently nobody is thinking about,” says Morris. “And that is the future.”
Morris says that is why the
IBAO has spent the money on studies to better understand the market.
“If you remember last year, the IBAO went out and did the ‘Understand the 21st Century,’ and we went to 400 or 500 brokers around Ontario,” says Morris. “The whole message of ‘this is what your customers are saying; this is what matters to them,’ did have brokers nodding their heads and there was some good conversation; but when asked: ‘How many of you actually interact with your customers at renewal time?’ only a small percentage of hands went up. Their answer was ‘We’re all too busy.’”
According to Morris, the personal relationship isn’t completely dead – it just needs to be more specific, more relevant.
The customer does want interaction, but they don’t want a newsletter “about 42 different things that don’t apply to me,” says Morris. “They are saying, ‘send me a newsletter because you know I have a cottage, and only has information on cottages.”
