Insurance | My Site 1

I worked as a project consultant for an insurance company that specializes in loss prevention services primarily to large corporations throughout the world. In this project, I collaborated with risk managers, researchers, and the company's clients to improve the quality of communication in both physical and digital risk reports.

Problem: The company felt their clients' compliance rates to risk recommendations were relatively low and were dropping among certain clients

my impact

15%

Potential increase in compliance rate

the team

I collaborated with risk managers, researchers, and the company's clients to improve the efficiency and quality of communication in both physical and digital risk reports.

uncovering the problem

As Risk Reports are circulated in a non-editable format (PDF), there is no easy way to track and follow up on recommendations at the right times.
While the Risk Report document is fairly standardized, the ways in which each party communicated, prioritized, and followed up before and after the report exhibited a large variability and were not efficient

Digging into these problems allow my team to come up with the question: What were human elements that played in the process and how could that be improved?

methodology

My team and I spent 2 months conducting in-depth, semi-structured interviews with the company's employees at different levels and some client risk managers to uncover behavioral barriers in service providers' actions
In the meantime, my team and I spent 1 month conducting focus group interviews with the company's clients who followed and did not follow the company's recommendations to uncover action barriers
Then, I spent 3 weeks analyzing risk reports and other materials to identify behavior/action gaps that stop clients from complying

Employees Interviews

Presented three cases about the relationship Account Engineer (AE) - Account Manager (AM) - client

Case 1: disagreement between AE-AM, clients did not see the recommendation 100% correct:
- Internal disagreement was not a problem, discussion before the meeting
- Disagreement rarely happens
Case 2: AE-AM aligned, but clients did not follow recommendations
- The AE asked the reasons why: i.e., perceived risk, budget, personnel situations
- The AE & AM communicated and strategize how to present the risk
Case 3: there is a broker:
- AE said they try to meet the broker before meeting the client
- The attitude toward the client differ by the broker: some brokers are challenging, and in some case, the AE can build a trusted relationship with the broker, while some brokers are former employees of the company, and they knew the internal process, they could help or they could be an obstacle

diagnosis

current platform was not interactive and brought negative user experiences

Unable to participate or engage: clients could not comment or send messages about particular needs through the platform, including specific questions about each item
No accurate and updated information about clients’ progress: clients could update the status, and report any progress in an accessible and hassle-free manner

lack of Support collaboration and communication beyond Risk Reports

Lack of any post-visit documents and presentations to follow up and did not provide summaries or support materials to accompany the report (e.g. level-specific summaries such as a “Manager’s Summary” or a “Plant Manager’s Summary”)

nonstandardized Recommendation process

While the Risk Reports are fairly standardized, the ways in which risk is presented, prioritized, and followed up on seem to be subject to wider variations

solution: Avoid information overload

How it worked: Replace and mix technical descriptions with more appealing, easier to
interpret, materials, such as visuals or testimonials (also interactive elements, see below - e.g.
“We have been working with FM Global for XXX years. We used to spend $XXXX on fixing the
damage. After we worked with FM Global, we were able to save $XXXX. What we really like when
working with FM Global is their expertise in YYY and ZZZ”)

solution: Framing of risk

How it worked: make current risks and room for improvement salient

Make information easy to interpret: Explain clearly the consequences of non-compliance with specific human elements in the Risk Reports with easy-to-follow examples (e.g. failing to complete this recommendation could lead to the sprinkler system not working properly if there’s ever a fire, quantifying the potential losses)
Convey overall assessments of different paths of action: Make use of joint evaluation to present risk so clients can have a better understanding of the whole situation

solution: Place clients in the loss domain

How it worked: Making potential losses more salient, rather than the benefits of taking actions

Why it could work: Individuals tend to misperceive risks, overweighting some probabilities and being insensitive to probability changes (Barseghyan et al., 2013)

solution: Offer detailed and actionable recommendations

How it worked: Make suggestions as detailed and actionable as possible: for example, instead of just saying “In-rack automatic sprinkler protection should be provided in the double-row rack in the ignitable liquids room and the single-row racks along the east and west walls where hanging,” provide more details like how and where to get the in-rack automatic sprinkler protection

Why it could work: One reason that leads to clients’ noncompliance is that they may understand the value of following instructions, but might be lacking the right motivation and tools to put that into action