Relationships are at the heart of keeping an industry such as the IPMI sector working smoothly where the end result is ensuring people’s health is being taken care of.
Advisers and providers alike at Health & Protection’s House of Lords roundtable agreed that collaboration supported by putting quality service and the personal touch together can make all the difference for clients and working relationships.
DOWNLOAD THE FULL HOUSE OF LORDS ROUNDTABLE SUPPLEMENT HERE
When asked what worked well in their experience to create and maintain strong business relationships between advisers and providers there were several elements.
Goldstar Healthcare director Kshama Patel highlighted the need for all firms to be treated equally.
“A level platform with providers giving all brokers the same sort of treatment is important,” she said.
Howden Employee Benefits & Wellbeing senior international consultant Richard Leadon added: “For me it’s speed of response; clients in a digital world expect answers straightaway.
“If you’re working with an insurer that’s very responsive and you can then relay that back to the client that’s brilliant for us and it’s brilliant for the client.
“So that communication speed is important.”
And having spent almost 25 years working for insurers before joining Howden at the start of the year, Leadon reflected that his experience from both positions was a benefit shared across the industry.
“I think a lot of us will work on each side of the fence, which goes a long way,” he continued.
“We know what the other person’s feeling, what they’re going through, and then you can work together to get a solution.”
Collaboration and communication
This willingness to collaborate and work together to solve problems and reach a satisfactory solution was widely recognised as a vital part to smooth operations.
A regular cadence of communications, talking to each other regularly and understanding propositions all go a long way to building bridges.
As part of this, Engage Health Group head of international benefits Penny Pemberton highlighted that inviting everybody to the party was a vital factor – insurer, client and adviser.
“Then everyone can understand what needs to be done,” she said.
“I know it’s not always practical and there’s sometimes the adviser-insurer only relationship or advisor-client only relationship is the solution, but getting everybody around the table and discussing the issues has worked for me in the past.”
That tripartite relationship can help advisers to understand insurer underwriting challenges or issues and considerations they are facing with healthcare pricing which can then be relayed back to the client.
Likewise it works in reverse where intermediaries can explain what clients are looking for, how they are wanting to address their situation and the pressure advisers can be under to find solutions quickly.
Regular visits between teams were also cited as being able to bring all those issues to life a little more, improve understanding and create better outcomes for clients.
UnitedHealthcare Global group sales director John Kaye emphasised the importance of the collaborative approach for providers too.
“It’s better when it’s collaborative because when the context behind some of those requests is understood, it’s not sometimes as easy as thinking providers should just do more,” he said.
“Whether it’s a price increase or a decline or we’ve excluded some people or even a complaint about a claim that didn’t get paid, it just needs dialogue and transparency.”
Complex chain of command
And these elements also showed through into Health & Protection’s IPMI Service Ratings as the panel discussed what the key elements they were looking for when comparing and rating provider service.
There was agreement that service and different factors could vary a lot depending on the provider but in general members tend to be well looked after and their claims processed efficiently.
However, as Engage Health Group’s Pemberton explained: “Sometimes it falls down on the corporate level speed of response.
“Clients do seem to expect turnaround time very quickly and there can be a chain of command that especially some of the larger insurers have to go through to provide information, which can take a lot of time and cause delays.
“But generally from the claims side it’s been very positive, unless I’ve just been lucky?”
Mercer Marsh Benefits multinational global mobility solutions leader UK Dave Hilton suggested insurers went through cycles in their service performance.
“Some of those cycles probably depend on where they are in their growth trajectory as a business,” he said.
“Those probably on a higher growth phase dip at times it’s fair to say, I think that’s just business, but I agree generally it’s good and insurers are supportive.
“Having a market where we know people are quite open, we’re having conversations and that helps a lot, and access to senior stakeholders which we probably wouldn’t have so much of in a bigger saturated domestic market, is useful.
“Managing expectations helps a lot with this and actually a lot of the processes there are very good.”
Take responsibility
However, Hilton argued that advisers and clients needed to take some responsibility for helping to reduce provider workloads and therefore improve overall service levels.
“A lot of clients just don’t listen or are poorly educated by us or by their HR team and if they don’t know where to go, sometimes that translates to poor service, where actually there isn’t,” he continued.
“There is something of a big role for both sides to play, to educate in the right place, to run enablement sessions, to keep as many touch points as we can together, and that naturally will improve and maintain the service levels where they should be.”
Grounding clients at the start of their relationships, particularly for high net worth customers can also be an important point for intermediaries to focus on, particularly where they may have exaggerated expectations.
“It may be very easy to just say ‘yes you’ll get everything’ and they probably will from a benefits perspective, but I think they need to understand from the outset there are some things that they have to do, particularly with some insurers, otherwise it just all spirals out of out of control,” Hilton added.
The value of good people was also raised and how they can fix problems quickly and efficiently.
“Insurers can live and die by their account managers,” said Linda Beavis, global leader – mobility health solutions for multinationals at Aon.
“If they’ve got really good account managers, it makes people’s lives so much easier and if they’ve got really average or below average then that can really be a trial to deal with.
“The really good ones are good at responding – even if they don’t have the answer, at least they acknowledge that they’re working on it, that they’re actually dealing with it rather than just ignoring you so you don’t know what’s happening, which is one of the most frustrating things.
“They’re also good at the education piece, good at talking to clients and you can have the tripartite meetings so they can explain to the client how they work, what they can do and what they can’t do, so they’re clear on setting the expectation.
“And they can have that conversation around the renewal; that ability to tell the story around their renewal and understanding their own product can be really lacking, so it really makes a huge difference if you’ve got good account managers.”
‘Real telltale sign’
The more routine or mainstream client pathway should not be neglected however, and Pacific Prime UK manager Jonathan Hill suggested this could be the truer sense of how an insurance provider operated.
“When I’m judging the ability of our insurance partners, I probably do so more of their ability to handle individual and family clients, because I have a bigger expectation over an SME or a corporate client,” he said.
“We have good account managers who make all the difference and they look up to you when something is escalated.
“But when we’re talking about that market segment without an account manager assigned and they are going through the general system where someone’s not going to pull it out and prioritise it, that’s an interesting journey.
“Those individuals are still high net worth, they could be paying $20,000 a year for their insurance, but they’re going down this standard insurance channels, and that is a real telltale sign of how well it works without the need of an account manager pulling it out the pile and fixing it.”
Importance of technology
One of the more practical and routine issues raised by the panel that could improve the way advisers work was the process of gathering quotes from insurers and providers.
Typically these are received through pdf files but often advisers compile these together into spreadsheets to present to clients alongside benefit lists, triggering a lot of work and the headache of transferring data from one format to another.
Providing quotes in a spreadsheet to simplify and speed-up this process was highlighted as a potential quick win and as particularly important where insurers include many different benefits as part of their core offerings.
As UnitedHealthcare Global’s Kaye acknowledged, technology can be a vital part of a provider’s offering but it is also about getting the right model for the insurer and the market concerned.
“We don’t do individual business so we don’t have technology to support the distribution, pricing and quoting on the corporate and SME side because we bring those together under a client manager,” he said.
“It’s much more a consultant-client manager relationship and that’s the priority for us.
“One of the things we scored low on in the service ratings was technology for brokers because we don’t have any at the moment.
“If you’re in that individual distribution space then you’re going to need to be a lot more immediate to service that quote, you don’t have the same five or six-day turnaround.
“So the priority with us is in the people and I think will continue to be for a little while,” he added.
DOWNLOAD THE FULL HOUSE OF LORDS ROUNDTABLE SUPPLEMENT HERE