And in the customer experience survey on which this report is based, LIMRA and Boston Consulting Group found that COVID-19 was a motivator for one in three Americans who started shopping for life insurance after the onset of the pandemic. According to a survey conducted by LIMRA, the number of Americans who said they feel a heightened need for life insurance increased from 49% in March, when lockdown orders began, to 58% in July. Financial professionals whose prospecting relies heavily on networking and social gatherings have been at a disadvantage for much of the year.īut if the pandemic has cut off an avenue of engagement for some financial professionals, it has drawn attention in a larger way to the reasons that people think about life insurance in the first place. This has had a particularly big impact at the top of the sales funnel-with financial professionals’ ability to create awareness and identify new prospects. As of the second quarter, two-thirds of financial professionals were still not meeting face-to-face with clients, according to a survey by Credit Suisse. It was predictable that the pandemic and the resulting limits on in-person interactions would disrupt insurance carriers’ efforts to develop new business. How COVID-19 Has Affected Life Insurance Demand and Activities
A recent survey by LIMRA and Boston Consulting Group reveals what a better customer experience means and how it might look. If technology can help make life insurance easier to understand, less trouble to apply for, and quicker to obtain, it will create a dramatically better experience for customers. Indeed, since the pandemic began, a big part of the value that insurers are getting out of technology has come from the “assist” that technology is giving to financial professionals. But our research shows that, for most Americans, a conversation with a financial professional is still central to the life insurance purchase process. That has certainly happened in other industries and may yet happen in this sector, especially with simpler products. Some in the industry probably wondered whether sales, at a time of emptied-out downtowns and main streets, would pivot toward direct online channels. Insurers have responded, quickly adopting existing tools that have suddenly become essential.ĬOVID-19 has also underscored the importance of financial professionals in the sale of life insurance products.
Or it was-until COVID-19 arrived, forcing the industry to go virtual overnight. Although digital tools are available, life insurance is still a business conducted primarily face-to-face, using many manual processes.
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