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How Speed to Value Will Destroy Traditional Insurance

It will not be insurtech startups that destroy the traditional insurance industry.

Rather, it will be a complete lack of urgency in regards to the insurance customer experience.

There is no more important aspect to the insurance customer experience over the next five years than speed to value.

How quickly can you deliver value to your customers?

The answer to that question could be the difference between disrupting and being disrupted.

Speed to Value

Today we’re talking about giant slaying. We’re talking about David putting a grain of sand in his slingshot and taking down Goliath. Today we’re talking about killing the incumbent.

There’s a simple reason why insurance industry disruptors are having any impact on our industry at all, and that has to do with speed to value.

It has to do with them looking at our industry and finding ways in which they can provide our products and services to insurance consumers in a faster, cheaper, and easier manner.

They’re getting the value of the product to the customer faster than the current incumbents are able to do. It’s that sole idea that even gives them a shot. It’s their foot in the door.

Common Misconception of Speed to Value

Today we’re going to talk about what a common misconception of speed to value is, how insurtech companies are using speed to value to win market share away from incumbents, the three layers of speed to value that most people understand, how we can use those in our business, in our traditional insurance model, and how we can make improvements to that model in order to deliver the value to customers faster and win the speed to value game.

Most people confuse speed to value with the innovators’ curve, meaning they think whoever gets to market fastest is ultimately going to be the winner.

In many cases, that’s true, but the innovators’ curve is a very different concept. What we are talking about in speed to value is how quickly you are able to deliver value to customers once they engage with your brand.

It’s that simple idea that is allowing insurtech companies – in particular, companies with no history inside the industry – to ultimately penetrate and make waves>

Now, some of that is just really, really good PR, as we’ve seen from the recent financial results that many of our insurtech darlings have had.

But that doesn’t mean that the philosophy, the concepts, the strategy that they’re using isn’t valid. Speed to value is about getting what you do, what your customers want from you as a provider to them, as fast as you can.

Speed to Value is Hard

In the traditional sense, speed to value is actually a major problem for insurance providers.

There’s no real, tangible item that they get to take home and put up on their wall or even really put in their desk since most policies are delivered electronically today.

Now, once you have that promise, it’s just a hope. There’s nothing there.

You don’t receive that value until you actually have a loss.

The speed to value, the amount of time between purchase of product and when actually receive the value from that product, can be a long time.

During that time between purchasing a policy and ultimately extracting the value from that policy, which is the claim reimbursement, the financial reimbursement, based on whatever product it is, that customer is deluged with marketing and branding and ideas, and they talk to friends.

This is when the initial high of making a decision to choose you, whether it’s the agency or the carrier, as their insurance provider, all the – I’m not going to say euphoria – the positive vibes that they had in choosing to make that purchase with you starts to get a little fuzzy.

They start to forget why they chose you because they’re getting pounded over the head with price and then they’re getting pounded over the head with commercials over here and then they see this person and they talk to their cousin and then they get a renewal and that renewal goes up 5% and they’re wondering,

“Why, if I didn’t file a claim, is my price going up?”

They still haven’t extracted any value from that policy.

It’s that time period when those good, positive vibes that they had when they ultimately made the decision to go with you as their provider start to become neutral and then possibly start to swing over to being negative because all they’re really feeling like is they’re paying more for something that they never actually used.

Speed to Value Solved

This is the problem that we have to solve, my friends.

We have to figure out ways that we can take the value that we provide and chop it up and deliver it throughout the course of the year.

Now, what that means is our only value to customers cannot be a little bit of education on the front end sale and when we actually pay out a claim because there is so much other time in between those two moments where that customer can become disenfranchised with us – with us as their provider, with us as their agent, with us as their carrier.

Then someone comes in with a slightly slicker message and new technology, and they can wedge their way in and buy those customers out from under us. This is the problem we have to solve.

In the insurance industry, there are three primary moments when speed to value matter more than anything else that you can do.

Read The Entire Article At:

https://www.agencynation.com/how-speed-to-value-will-destroy-traditional-insurance

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