Lynne Wallace
Oh my gosh! What a week! Google Compare decides to get out of the personal auto insurance online shopping business. And Zenefits has forever changed our mental images about the use of "stairwells" in creating a positive workplace culture. Believe it or not, these two events have something fundamentally in common...a misstep related to consumer need and demand for professional insurance expertise.
Google Compare— the much more high-integrity example—shot fear through the independent agent community when it announced it was getting into the insurance business. The announcement included the unveiling of an online comparison tool that listed several major carriers as partners. Now, a little over a year later, it seems that just being Google doesn't predict success...especially when it comes to insurance. Sources report that Google Compare experienced only about 10% of the traffic they expected. Two reasons were cited. First, they underestimated the complexity of personal auto insurance. Second—and here's the more important one—they found "U.S. consumers are still enamored with their agents."
Zenefits, on the other hand, went down a dark path. They were so smitten by the platform they had launched that they not only devalued the need for insurance expertise but ultimately began to view the entire industry and its legal regulations as an obstacle to doing business. Impatient to wait for employees to get insurance licensed, a secret training program called "Macro" "may have" allowed employees to cheat at a mandatory online course, letting them complete it in less than the legally required 52 hours of training.
At the same time, news of "whiskey shots, kegs of beer, bottles of Champagne, packs of cigarettes, quickies in the stairwell" stand in polar opposition to the serious nature of health insurance advocacy. Imagine the mother who calls in needing help navigating for payment of a special medical procedure for her child with leukemia and connects with a Zenefits representative who's just come off a stairwell break.
In December, we asked the NDOI community, "If you had the power, what would you do to change the insurance industry?" The number one answer was...improve the industry image. Well, this week, our competition just helped us out. And we can build on the opportunity...but we'll have to do so nationally as a community.
Using the blog in your NDOI profile, send a message to your clients/prospects and on social media about something consumers can count on you for, maybe in the event of a claim, perhaps something they may not know...one thing, short and simple. It's easy, just click below, log in, go to your My News, click the pencil icon and Add Your Own Post. Title it...One Thing I Will Do To Help. It will be a collective shout-out across the country, a national reminder of the specialized expertise and high integrity value of professional insurance agents.
To save you time, here's a blog template to customize... and feel free to use the
image attached here...
One Thing I Will Do To Help
March is Insurance Industry Awareness month. Sounds funny doesn't it...insurance people asking for attention. But, high integrity insurance professionals across the county, committed to a stronger, more powerful, insurance industry to serve you, are uniting together to share things consumers can count on us for.
