Gracechurch on stage at BIBA 2023

Ben Bolton Gracechurch MD will be appearing at the BIBA 2023 Conference on Wednesday 10th May alongside leading insurers discussing the Gracechurch UK Insurers Monitor survey results and how brokers and insurers can work together to improve service for the customer in a challenging environment.

Ben comments: “The UKIM Survey in association with BIBA is the first major independent survey of broker opinion on insurer service and as such ground-breaking. The timing is really interesting, given the incoming Consumer Duty rules forcing insurance orgs to make sure that customers’ interests are protected, plus the fact that brokers will need to be more focused on which insurers they select in future terms of service quality. With two senior brokers and insurance leaders the session will be punchy, but also about the potential ways forward. I’m really looking forward to the session which is already hugely oversubscribed, so there is clearly a ton of interest in this topic.”

Adam Winslow

CEO UK & Ireland General Insurance:
Aviva

Ben Bolton

Managing Director: Gracechurch Consulting

Lea Cheesebrough

Managing Director: Movo Partnership

Paul Dickson

Chief Executive Office: Innovation Broking

Neil Galjarrd

Managing Director, Markel UK

The challenges and oppurtunities of providing great customer service in a post pandemic world

e-trading: a good thing?

One of the first hot topics covered by the Gracechurch-BIBA survey was inevitably e-trading. At a simple level we just wanted to know how many brokers were etrading and how regularly, and we got the answers to those two questions – around six in ten are e-trading regularly and Polaris UK estimates that 500,000+ policies were digitally traded last year. The survey also shows that brokers are quite positive about digital trading, seeing it as being generally helpful to the customer experience.

The fly in the ointment however is that most also experience ‘computer says no’ moments regularly.

Getting the sweet-spot between tech and human intervention is really the key to success, but in practice quite hard to get right, so these results are being discussed with various groups including the ITIC Committee at BIBA, the tech providers, brokers and carriers. Already ideas and potential solutions are coming up in the discussions, and we’ll be taking this forward more formally as a Service Quality Workstream (SQW).