“It’s that time of the year again. The shops are full of panicked last-minute shoppers, bars are packed with friends and colleagues drinking a toast to the festive season, and people start turning on their out of offices, ready to switch off and enjoy Christmas with their families.
I’m pretty organised this year (apart from the dreaded wrapping) so before I switch off and hit the fizz I wanted to take some time to reflect on the past 12 months.
It’s been a year of personal highlights for me, moments that I will look back on with pride as we ring in 2018.
In May we sent out a survey to our personal lines broker partners and I was grateful that so many took the time out to respond and share their honest feedback on our service. I was delighted to receive the results as we’d been rated so highly in a number of categories. I was particularly pleased to see that account management was one of the areas rating highly as I really believe that the key to success in our industry is developing strong relationships with partners and ensuring they know where to go if they need advice, guidance or a strong partner to work with. To have over 80% of our brokers rate us as either “very good” or “excellent” in this category suggests that we’re doing something right. I will definitely be continuing to drive this as a priority in our teams.
In July we were buzzing to be crowned Personal Lines Insurer of the Year, for a second year running, at the British Insurance Awards. As always this is a highly contested category and we were honoured to be shortlisted, so to win was an amazing moment for the whole team!
In September the buzz continued as we were ranked the number 1 personal lines insurer in the Insurance Times Broker Service Survey. This means a lot to us in particular because the survey is purely based on broker feedback. For us it’s a fantastic testament to the work we’re doing to maintain our relationships and deliver a great customer service.
In December we received the best Christmas present we could possibly ask for when we won the Insurance Times award for Personal Lines Insurer of the Year. As this award was entirely voted for by brokers, I was absolutely delighted when our name was announced on the night and we accepted our trophy from the very funny Kevin Bridges!
All of these achievements have been wonderful, but I know we can’t take our eye off the ball. The industry is evolving rapidly along with customer expectations so we need to make sure that we’re still working closely with our brokers to deliver the products and service that they and their customers expect from us.
As we move into 2018 we’ll continue to build on and strengthen our broker relationships and we’ve developed a new format for our regular networking events. We’ll now be inviting our brokers to join us for a quarterly lunch in the City where we will give them an opportunity to discuss key topics and challenges that face us all. It’ll be a great opportunity for them to meet the fab Covéa Insurance team (if I do say so myself) as well as network with their peers and share insight and discuss topics such as people and culture, regulation and new technology. Hopefully our brokers will find these enjoyable and useful.
We also have a series of product refreshes on the cards where we’ll continue to apply the principles of behavioural economics to our already strong products, so that they are more simple and straightforward to our customers, cutting out the jargon and giving them the information they really need, in a more engaging way.
So before I crack open that bottle and get wrapping, I want to thank all of our brokers for their support throughout 2017. We don’t know what the industry will have in store for us in 2018 but I guarantee that it won’t be boring and that we’ll continue to work with brokers to meet any challenges head on together and deliver a great service to our customers!
Merry Christmas!
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