Bad habits in group risk and how to break them

We humans are creatures of habit and routine.  It makes us feel secure.  And we have been known to cling to habits and routines even when those patterns are really bad for us.

In 2008 we created a plan to create a new group life and disability insurer that purposefully looked at very process in our value chain and say why do it like that?  Is there a better, simpler, quicker, more economic way.

One of the sacred orthodoxies was that clients won’t provide frequent data updates and will be hugely resistant to any change to the annual “simplified” administration method.   Our research showed however that the insurers supplying this part of the employee benefits structure were the least well rated and liked by the corporate clients.   “Messy, late accounts and costs that leach into subsequent budget years” sums up what the customers’ finance people  said.

So our approach is based on two assumptions

1.      If you ask the person close to the data at a point in time when the data is current they will give you complete current data  

2.      Clients will like to pay for the actual cover they have in the period that they have it and to be able to budget for the costs  

The big pension led intermediaries who pass data through pensions administrations units seem to love making this horribly complicated and the very biggest corporate clients tend to ask for longer to pay their bills – if they have a “Treasury” function that is a sign that like to hold onto cash -  but pretty much everybody else knows what to do when you ask them to provide a quarterly update of their people insured under the scheme.

Doing a job once a year means you have to relearn it. A quarterly prompting e mail with embedded links to a secure website that arrives when you have the last month’s data to hand because you have been working on it for other purposes just works.  It has become one of those comforting habits that makes life easier.