Good service will be about ‘great balance’ between technology and humans

Technology could play a key role in insurers providing good service in the future, according to Ben Bolton, managing director at Gracechurch Consulting.

Bolton was speaking as part of a seminar panel entitled The challenges and opportunities of providing great customer service in a post-pandemic world during the first day of the 2023 Biba conference (10 May 2023).

He said the key to good service was a “promise kept” – similar to brand work.

And looking to the future, he added: “Good service is going to be about a great balance between technology and humans.”

Fundamentals 

During the session, Bolton was joined by Aviva’s chief executive of UK and Ireland general insurance Adam Winslow, Movo Partnership managing director Lea Cheesbrough and Markel UK divisional managing director Neil Galijaard.

Cheesbrough highlighted that good service was a “broad brush statement”.

She added: “Trying to encapsulate it into a sentence, for me it’s a customer journey that’s guided by service level agreements (SLAs) and delivers outcomes that are agreeable to all parties that isn’t just in our industry, but right through our lives and we have to make sure that we don’t steer away our focus on that.”

Winslow, meanwhile, highlighted that “visibility”, “responsibility” and “flawless delivery” can enable broker partners “to do right by their customers”.

“Those three fundamentals are underpinned by things like access to empowered decision making, flexible underwriting approach, fast and fair claims settlement and things like a choice of channels,” he added.

”Somewhere in that set of ingredients is good service.”

For specialist insurers, Galijaard said “good service is about doing the basics well”, but also about “adding service to the client”.

“In our world, that would be very much about advice lines [and] care practitioner support in the client space,” he added.