My last blog outlined key opportunities life insurers should explore to help sustain and grow business. Capturing the potential requires certain action from life insurers.

My colleague Patrick Lyons, leads our North America Life Insurance Transformation Practice. In a just-published report on life distribution, Patrick suggests a five-step, integrated approach that life insurers should take:

Register to download the report.

1. Move to a solutions-driven, customer-centric model, focusing on the whole customer through a consolidated, single-point relationship across products and business lines, and viewing a purchase as the beginning of a life-long opportunity to address customers’ evolving needs.
2. Apply a team approach—typically four to eight advisors who work as a single unit—to a customer’s issues, generating significantly higher performance for financial advisors.
3. Create succession plans, providing a platform for long-term relationship development so that successors can inherit books of business.
4. Digitize the agency to treat every customer as a digital customer, empowering agents with advanced digital tools and creating an experience that facilitates smart communication and timely, appropriate actions. Along this line, we expect to see more sophisticated automated investment services (or “robo-advisors”) make greater impact in wealth management.
5. Modernize performance and compensation, implanting the attributes of high performers attributes into the larger middle ring of the performance ladder while also examining and realigning incentive compensation for tighter alignment with the carrier’s goals.

Carriers that get this five-step approach right can better distinguish themselves through the more visible elements of distribution. A visible element that I will discuss further in my next blog is the robo-advisor.

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