A brokers guide to implementing a successful insurance scheme

Authored by John Dawe, Partnerships Director – RSA Delegated

Insurance brokers are a critical influence on the evolution of the UK’s insurance market. With an eye for spotting new client groups, they are always looking for ways to provide tailored solutions to meet client's specific needs.

Over the years, our established relationships with brokers and profound level of industry insight, have allowed us to develop various niche schemes, tailored to specific groups of clients. This partnership and bespoke solution development often prove to be a great asset for a broker, helping them to drive sales, improve brand awareness, and ultimately, provide stability and growth.

Though each scheme may vary in focus and key features, they all require a systematic approach to development in order to succeed. The following guide will help you to understand exactly what you need to do to be successful.

1. Identify your niche

Successful schemes tend to focus on customer segments that have similar characteristics and risk profiles. This provides brokers with a unique advantage to create personalised products for customers that they cannot access elsewhere in the open market. Points to consider include:

• Know your customer: What customers are you trying to serve and what problem are you trying to solve?
• Access to insight: Do you have an existing book of business that would benefit from a bespoke solution or are you regularly negotiating specific endorsements for a particular type of client?
• Use of external data: Public data sources such as the Office of National Statistics or Google searches can help you focus on a particular area that is growing and underserved. Trade associations and industry forums are another rich source of information

2. Test your concept

Once you have an outline of what you want to create, it is important to test whether your general direction is sound. Use as many experiments as you can and try to keep your costs low.

Interviews with customers or trade forums are a good example of how you can test customer needs and willingness to purchase without committing too much in time and money. However, what people say and do are not always the same, so set the bar high (80%+) when it comes to establishing whether the evidence supports your assumptions. 

You can also compliment your customer interview with search trend and web traffic analysis to strengthen your findings. Google Trends, for example, can provide you with a wealth of analytics based on common searches.

Other experiments include:

• Surveys: Providers like Survey Monkey can help you create and send out easy online surveys through email or social media posts
• Sales enquiry analysis/feedback: Ensure you ask key questions when talking to your customers, scope out their needs and record the feedback
• Social media/email campaign: Write compelling copy and track the conversation generated

3. Prove it will work

At this stage, you are trying to assess and ultimately prove that you can deliver your proposition to customers and generate the business to match your ambitions and make it a viable idea.

There are a couple of simple ways to test the water:

• Build a web page, with content that clearly articulates your proposition and add a measurable call-to-action, for example, email sign-up
• For a technology-led proposition, create a prototype that potential customers or an insurer partner can try out

Ultimately, you’re assessing whether to continue to adapt your scheme idea, or in some cases, whether the best strategy is move on and allocate your time elsewhere. Customer feedback is therefore vital, find a way to capture the results and act on any improvements.

4. Develop an implementation plan

Once you’ve decided in a viable scheme, you need to think about how to bring it to life. Questions to ask yourself include:

• How are you going to market?
• What size of budget can you allocate?
• How are you going to manage the implementation?
• Do you have the resources, or do you need to look outside for support?

Considering about these points clearly before you begin any kind of implementation will help avoid – and be prepared for – any unexpected issues as you move forward.

5. Partner with the right insurer

The final – and perhaps most important – step is to partner with an insurer who shares your passion and ambition for your scheme. The right insurance partner will help create the right product and pricing structure and grant you with delegated authority to enable you to trade with confidence.

If you would like to make contact with John Dawe to find out more about the RSA schemes proposition, CLICK HERE, leave a message and youTalk-insurance will pass your enquiry on