Trusted advisors educate clients about insurance and more
Are you doing all you can to serve as a trusted advisor for clients?
Another strange, pandemic school year is coming to a close.
For my tween, this means closing the door on remote learning, thank goodness. As if parents weren’t already aware of the importance of devoted, hard-working teachers to the education of their kids, remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic has made that abundantly clear.
My youngster’s school and teachers moved mountains to make sure that distance learning was effective. But after months of being indoors most of the day, battling distractions to get through lessons, and watching as my once-enthusiastic student become increasingly unmotivated and apathetic, I am more than ready for her to return to a peer-learning environment, even if that means wearing a mask for eight hours a day.
With the bulk of her life happening online over the last 15 months, I also watched as my 12-year-old became increasingly involved with online personalities, or “streamers,” and her eagerness to part ways with her allowance for their “merch.” And so, in addition to fretting over the learning she may have lost in remote school as well as her stunted social development, I’m now considering strategies for supercharging her financial literacy, which is education I certainly never received as a kid.
The lack of financial know-how
Many adults are just as naïve about money management as my tween, not to mention insurance and where it fits into their financial security as well as the economy. As the pandemic business interruption coverage litigation has illustrated, consumers are often unaware of how insurance works, what it covers and what’s excluded. Many are unaware of the different sectors within the insurance industry, and they lack an understanding of the roles and functions of different insurance professionals.
The average consumer certainly doesn’t know about the laws the regulations that impact insurance. And most glaringly, many insureds are unaware of the steps involved in the claims process.
This scenario opens up a huge opportunity for insurance agents, brokers and carriers to step in as a teacher of sorts and enlighten clients to the industry’s nuances as a way of building trust and battling the reputation problems that have arisen from pandemic coverage disputes.
It follows that Mike Russ Financial Training Centers Inc., based in San Diego, has developed an “Insurance Basics” handbook that beginning by explaining the purpose and mission of insurance, how it works as a business, basic insurance terms and types of coverage. This 27-page PDF available online at no cost also illuminates the risk manager’s job, the legal elements of insurance, basic policy structure, and the industry landscape including the role of rating bureaus. Learning these basics as a young adult not only could have prepared me for my job as an insurance journalist, it also would have set me up to more confidently navigate adulthood.
“The ultimate goal of any agent is to provide such a high level of service that the client couldn’t imagine doing business anywhere else,” Indio Technologies CEO Michael Furlong wrote in a 2020 article for PropertyCasualty360.com. “In today’s competitive business environment, agents must be able to provide value to a client that they would not be able to get anywhere else through critical industry insights and specialized advice.”
These wise words underscore the question: Are you doing all you can to serve as a trusted advisor for clients? The benefits of that goal are numerous, the least of which is the establishment of consumer confidence in the insurance business.
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