This year will be “the year of multi-benefits” for protection advice firms, according to Aviva strategic account manager, Dan Wall.
Speaking at the Advice Show Protection special, a webinar hosted by SimplyBiz, Wall stated the year ahead will be about identifying customer needs and making sure they are being covered.
“That’s not just buying the home, that’s also keeping it and really going after that multi-asset business,” he explained. Wall added advisers need to look at how income protection and critical illness cover works in clients’ day-to-day lives.
This is because if you get clients buying into the why and the what then protection is more likely to be taken out and will benefit the customer more.“For me it’s the year of multi-benefits,” he said.
As well as identifying opportunities for protection advisers in the upcoming year, Wall also spoke about potential issues with “getting customers in front of you” as one of the biggest challenges.
He explained that, with technology emerging at a fast pace, the challenge is speaking to customers and making sure that, when you’re speaking to them, it’s about what they can lose, not what they gain.
“So it’s having those real, in-depth conversations with customers and pointing out exactly what their lives look like if protection is not in place,” he said.
Additionally, Wall warned about allowing advisers' self belief to inform their business, stating: “While we might be worried about the cost of living, don’t let your own beliefs get in the way of a protection conversation.”
He explained last year saw an increase in business for the protection market, and said he had spoken with some advisers recently who have experienced an increase in business.
“That means customers want protection conversations,” he said. As a result, Wall predicted the challenge for this year is confidently having conversations with customers and having the ability to point out and identify the needs of customers in a way that they buy into it. “It’s the challenge we have every year but I wouldn’t let those self beliefs of ‘they can’t afford it’ get in the way,” he said.
Also speaking on the panel was Cirencester strategic partnership manager, Jo Wilkie, who spoke about the positive statistics recently released by the protection industry.
“As an industry we have massively improved in making public our claims stats, and they are up in the 90 percentages,” she said.
However, while she acknowledged the statistics offered a positive impression, she asked “do customers really understand and can they relate to what those stats mean in real terms?”
In order to aid customers in this aspect, Wilkie advised both the process around making a claim and offering case studies are “really important” for improving customer understanding.
Speaking about case studies specifically, she stated they offer “real life examples of how customers are benefitting when they need to make a claim”, something which can “really bring it to life for an adviser talking to a customer”.
