There is an opportunity I sense for Life Insurance companies to lead the financial services industry out of trust crisis & reinstate that lost credibility with policy owners. One would agree that Insurance, more particularly life Insurance, is just a “promise” and not a product that people can touch & feel. Also, One would not be there to realize the benefits of such a policy and more often than not customers are not eager to realize the benefits they pay for!! A different way to look at it is that you have customers with you for their life time! If life Insurance carriers learn to engage their policy owners, the stickiness of such a business is very high & the co-creation opportunities for new business will emerge naturally.
So one idea I have is to engage each & every policy owner in Corporate Social Responsibility Endeavors your company currently takes up. For eg: For every premium payment reminder you send out, you ask your policy owners to choose causes (from a list of 10) that they would rank as causes worthy of corporate support & that verdict you get from your policy owners drives your corporate social responsibility activities. Well, if you think it worthwhile, you can solicit such a drive through your social networking channels like Facebook, Linkedin etc or getting your customer to vote through your website on their individual logins!
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As Ronald Reagan used to say “Trust, but Verify”. So far one of the primary tools to verify the financial institution’s stability and trustworthiness was to refer to the reports of Credit Rating Agencies (CRA) like A. M. Best, Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s etc. The 2007-08 great recession has showed us that many financial instruments rated as AAA, meaning as good as the US treasury, failing to pay back the capital. A lot many of these were changed to C grade post fact when there was no value – people have already their money and their trust. In the coming years, I wanted to know the opinion of the fellow bloggers, on what will be the new Holy Grail. I see this playing a big role in managing the separate accounts in variable life and variable annuity products.
Posted by: Souvik Roychoudhury | August 21, 2009 1:24 PM