The Truths Not Said
One of the expert speakers at Insurtech Boston '24 was Kate Terry, co-founder and CEO of Surround Insurance. In her session, she shares her observations about the insurance industry and some of the truths not said.
Consumers want digital
What are we selling? We’re selling financial protection, but the feeling of safety and security that we’re providing them is the other piece of our product. That piece is best delivered by humans. Customers want digital ease, and that’s what we’ve got: a fully enabled digital front end and a team of seven producers closing on the back end.
Automate everything now
Wisdom, in the sense of knowing your customers and what you’re trying to accomplish, needs to precede automation. It sounds obvious, but it's not always when you put the cool toys in my hands. Today, we have a thinner, much leaner set of marketing automation that is written in the right colloquial tone, and it goes out at times of day that actually makes sense relative to what our customers need.
No such thing as “too helpful”
The measure that predicts “best” whether we’re going to issue a policy is not price; it’s not product availability; it is how fast we respond to the customer when they come to us. What we were doing when being “extra super helpful” was spreading ourselves so thin that we weren’t selling to the people we were meant to sell to. Spreading ourselves too thin is not about excellence; it’s about mediocrity.
The regulations say…
If you’re a startup MGA working off investor money with zero customers and a filing waiting, that is not a good strategy. If you haven’t read the regulations, you don’t know what they say, nor do your vendors. We read the regulations and reached out personally, not through the vendor. We got three products admitted, two personal lines and one commercial lines, in just over three months, and we’re off to the races.
Insurance is a commodity
While insurance pricing and products may be commodities, the work that we do is not. Taking care of people, giving them that sense of safety and security, and enabling them to protect their families is not a commodity; it’s noble work all of us do every day. We go to work, and we make life fairer. Our humanity can never be a commodity.
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