The Better Service Blog

I enjoyed this post on bear shavingby Seth Godin today.

He talks about how business is good at dealing with the symptoms of a problem rather than the cause of the problem.

I’m sure we all have examples of where this has occurred in our business experience.

This was reinforced to me today when one of Australia’s life insurance companies introduced their version of an electronic life insurance application.  Rather than completing a paper-based version, I can now sit with clients, ask them questions and the program will add or remove questions based on their answers.  At the end of the process the program can actually make an underwriting decision and approve the policy.

This is a great idea – think of the time it will save us.  In the old method we had to photocopy the application before we sent it.  It would have to be manually entered at the insurer’s end (with the potential for mistakes).  It was then placed in a queue for an underwriter to look at.  The process involved a lot of different people, and was time consuming.

An electronic application makes the process faster.  And that’s important in the financial planning world.  Once we have a client agree with our recommendations for insurance, we want to get the cover in place as quickly as possible.

So what’s the problem?

From the insurer’s point of view, they’ve introduced a new process that speeds up the decision-making process and gets business approved faster.

But not everything can be underwritten electronically.  There are still some instances where we’ll need to use a paper-based application.  And that takes time.  The problems that previously existed are still there.  The inefficiencies haven’t changed.

Perhaps the positive outcome is that if more applications are being processed electronically, this actually frees up the administrative staff so they can process the paper-based applications faster.

Only time will tell.

I’m happy that they’ve introduced a system that makes my job easier.  And I’m happy that they’ve chosen an electronic solution (the more automated you can make a process, the lower the error rate).  I’m just not looking forward to the next time I need to lodge something manually.  It’s then that I’ll discover whether they’ve fixed the problem, or just shaved the bear.

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