Transcription:
David Vanalek: (
Excellent. We'll kick this off this afternoon, welcome everyone, to our session here on next level automation navigating the inure tech and FinTech landscape, I'm actually really excited to be moderating this particular, panel with you we're, kind of reformulated a little bit to be a fireside chat here with my guest, Lori Pon, just really quick in terms of introductions, myself, my name is David Vanalek. I am the chief legal and compliance officer at Richmond National insurance company. we are a, excess and surplus lines insurance carrier that, specializes in commercial lines with respect to small and mid-size businesses around the country. prior to my, current role, because you may be sitting here asking yourself why as an attorney at a conference like this moderating a panel, prior to, my current role, I was with 14 years with a large international global insurer.
David Vanalek: (
I was their chief operating officer for claims for three of those years. and 11 of those years, I came up through the professional liability side of the house and oversaw, management liability, employment practices, liability, just tons and tons of litigated claims, unfortunately. so, but that being said, I do know a little bit about, this topic but I, but the expert to my left here again, I'm very excited because Lori and I had, a great conversation leading up to today's session. Lori is the director of claim strategy, and innovation at, AAA The Auto Club Group. she is a 20 plus year veteran in the industry with extensive, incredible experience, all along the value chain of, developing a holistic vision and roadmap, for the implementation of technologies into the claims space.
David Vanalek: (
She's been responsible for the build implementation organizational change management, which we can't ever get enough of, as well as, getting that buy in from, the C-suite and investment, from the company, to bring those, technologies and solutions, to the customers, at the end of the day. So, with that being said, this is gonna be a Q and a session with, Lori here, I would encourage that if the, audience has any questions, please raise your hand, ask the question, we'll, go ahead and do our best to, try to respond to it. So, with that being said Lori, in terms of this particular topic of kind of navigating the, landscape of InsureTech and fintechs from, the claims perspective, and I know that's, that's a little bit different from, the underwriting side of the house claims in particular, is closest to the customer at the end of the day, at the time they need it most right.
David Vanalek: (
And that maybe is a little bit more unique than, other industries, right? and so you need really that person who can bring that level of empathy, understand, put themselves in the shoes of that individual and, really create that human connection and technology can help with that. I don't think it can replace that, but it can certainly help with that process. so in terms of like navigating the sea of opportunities that are out there from, a technology perspective, what attracts you to potential partners, and how do you conduct discovery to identify, a best match?
Lori Pon: (
So, by way of my background, I was an underwriter in a prior life. So I hope I could live up to all the billing, that David provided. But basically my role at the auto clip group is to really vet tech and understand the alphabet soup. We have a lot of, I have a lot of perspective partners reaching out to me on LinkedIn. There's a high noise to signal ratio. So how do you figure out if you'll grant a meeting, and what makes a prospective partner? We don't call, our vendors, vendors we call them partners. And I see a couple of smiling faces of some of our vendor partners out there in the audience that we work with in one of the things that really attracts me to a prospective partner is, do you understand the use case of insurance? Can you talk PNC?
Lori Pon: (
So for me, it's private and casually claims. So if you have a damaged car damage auto, do you even understand who you're talking to? I have a lot of people that reach out to me on linked and, even at some of the conferences that have not done the research to understand even what my business is. So that's meeting you at hello. Do you understand who you're potentially pitching? And then when we have at the initial discovery call, are we talking about use cases? Are you listening to business friction? And do you understand how your tech can really enable frictionless experiences? Cuz that's really what we're driving for hyper personalized, frictionless experiences, and some of the things that some of the partners do exceptionally well that make me wanna write a white paper. So one of the things that I'll do is I'll write a one pager and I have touch base with our chief loan officer.
Lori Pon: (
And this is why I think this is gonna move the needle. And I work in partnership with prospective partners. How do we craft the demo? How do we craft the discovery? And the first, I think the first step is that first meeting. And are you informed and are you coalesced around understanding the business prop under which your tech would really drive the needle? And some are come to that conversation very well equipped, very well, acquainted some come at the conversation, potentially not ready to take that first step forward, where we're able to accelerate the discovery and really where I'd wanna put them in front of our C-suite. So those are some of the, I think some of the components and then also I'm really well connected in the industry. So I'll pick up the phone and, or drop an email, an SMS to a colleague.
Lori Pon: (
What do you think of this perspective partner? What has been your experience? What's been your journey? So I do a lot of informal networking to say to myself, should I take this hour that I may never get back? And probably one other piece that I tell prospective partners is please, please no death by PowerPoint. So it's a very well thought reimagined way when we have a partner pitch us and I'll get into that. Cause I know one of your other questions, comes around. How do you build that particular demo or that conversation? And when I have internal stakeholders starting the IME during presentations, cuz we're now in the zoom, ISE, that's when I know, right? I know you haven't hit that needle. And one of the other things I do is I'll pitch in front of my innovation team. So I have a team of 15 people and we're like this little skunkworks team in their math majors.
Lori Pon: (
Some are claim professionals. So I have staffed our innovation team with a series of different skill sets. Some are great on analytics. Some are great on claim process. And we actually exercise the tech. We write the use cases. My team leads the defect meeting. So we know enough to be dangerous. We're not the factory, we're not coding, but we know enough to be dangerous to bridge that intermediary gap between the business between it. We sit in the middle, we report to the business, but we're business tech. And so when we're delivering that reimagined experience, we know what we're talking about. We can talk techy, talk, we can talk business talk. So that helps also our perspective partners from a thought leadership standpoint, from an iteration of their roadmap standpoint. I know we're gonna get into that later, but that's another thing you look for is your partner open to what drives business friction for you. And can you influence that roadmap? Those are something that we look that's a, key point that we look for in our partners. And we find that our inure tech and FinTech partners are way more agile. Like I'm not going to influence the teams, Microsoft teams, we use it. I'm not gonna influence that roadmap. I get it. But I'm gonna influence insure tech FinTech roadmaps because they wanna listen and that we know claims they know tech. So it's a beautiful symbiotic relationship if you pick the right partner.
David Vanalek: (
Yeah. And Laura, I know, we, had chatted about that. maybe some of the smaller, insured techs smaller, mid-size partners, they are more agile. they're able to, basically, just pick up the phone, have discovery sessions where they're identifying what are the business needs and then trying to aggregate that maybe amongst different, carriers or distribution channel partners, that sort of thing. so, kind of, like the next piece of this is, when many carriers it's not, uncommon in the industry, it have become very successful over time. Multi-billion dollar corporations, by acquiring other, insurance companies and they have multiple, antiquated, legacy systems, some, sometimes, 15, 20, 20, 30 years old or so encoding language that almost never, that don't exist any longer when, you see that Lori, when it comes to modernizing legacy systems, how do you work to bring technology together, and to implement that seamless interaction for customers, because there's that run the engine on all of those legacy systems, but then there's new opportunities. And how do you make sure that, the customer at the end of the day doesn't notice or sees that, but in fact, their experience improves.
Lori Pon: (
So I look and I quack like that duck that he described, we have seven claim systems to the auto club group. We love a merger in acquisition. So we have eight policy systems, seven claim management systems. It's pretty epic. We have instances of high tech like the Guidewire type systems of the world, the duck systems of the world, but we also have a Cobal based system. Yes, I did say Cobal, we're trying to sunset that this should all be gray. but one of the things that we focus on is how do we cobble these experiences together? And we're starting to blend in like bidirectional texting digital payment. We can still do some of those things, even though we have tech debt and a lot of tech debt. And so one of the things that we do is we try to look at solutions where we can still build that experience with our legacy systems, because it's just not a, fast divorce off the legacy system.
Lori Pon: (
I'm sure everyone in the audience can relate to me whether you are, an in like we're a carrier. And we lo, like I said, we love to buy a club. And along with that club comes new systems. So part of my role in overseeing our claim tech roadmap, our strategic roadmap is to help reimagine what can we do to accelerate the drive to one system one common? So we have a hashtag in our department it's hashtag claims nation. So there are like 850 of us that are working on adjudicating claims, whether it be a catastrophic injury. So like a car accident. And someone's really, really injured in Michigan. We have unlimited PIP. So these claims we have claims from 1970, and then we have home losses, total fires. So how can you provide your team member with amazing experiences, even if you're not the highest tech we keep on adding things to the tool basket.
Lori Pon: (
We still have double Decker, two of ours. We don't have an elegant experience, but we really, really lean in on organizational change management. I love that our chief claim officer has invested in my team. We're not customer facing. So I'm always trying to prove value in my team of 15., I have been over very large operations at ACG. I've been over cat PIP. I've been over, liability, lit I've been over, a quick claim adjustment unit, our contact center. So those experiences help me understand the role of the business. And then what could we do with tech very involved in the tech community and making sure that I understand what's cutting edge and how we can blend that in. And we continue to try to pick tech that even if it's like, I'll give you an example. We text with you related to your claim.
Lori Pon: (
We don't have the API yet. So it's seven pieces of information. It's not elegant. We don't have an API where we're hitting a button to create a text thread with you to talk about your home claim, your auto claim, but we can text with you. And we didn't wait to get to the API. It's on the horizon, it's on my dashboard for this year, but we have to turn it on. And so we made it happen. And the NPS improvement's pretty epic. We have a thousand basis point difference when we text with you regarding your claim, versus when we don't, if we ghost you, it's even worse, then if we never offered you at all. So we're looking at those different barometer and we're measuring. So that's where those math majors and those analytic colleagues are really helpful because they help us build these dashboards.
Lori Pon: (
And it's putting a value on the investment in innovation. Cuz sometimes you can say to yourself, did that really hit the mark? And you're all like ad hoc. Wondering if it met the mark, we're not anecdotal about it. We're down to the data level, able to attribute like with our FinTech who is amazing. they give us all of this industry data. So we have our cohort data, we have our data and we really have that north star where we should be. And those are the kind of partners that we're looking for, aspirationally, where should we be? Where are we right now? And we're able to also take a look at data. So I'll give you an example. We rolled out our digital payment, our contemporized platform. We were struggling with vendors wanting to accept virtual cards, which helps mitigate the claim process. We were getting rebates from some of these cards and we had really low penetration.
Lori Pon: (
So we, started the project. We turned everyone on. It was a complete disaster cuz you have mom and pop shops that don't wanna pay credit card fees. So then we turned everyone off that didn't accept it a hundred percent. That was not the right thing to do. So then our FinTech came in and said, listen, we can give you a, cohort file that says these vendors accept that a hundred percent we know across our landscape. This is what this looks like. So that's again, leveraging data. So then we did this phase one A through like one F approach and we increased our vendor card accept rate by like 2000% over like four months. So I think blending our experience with their experience and using data. We started to do that much more proactively and more effectively. And those are the kind of partners that we seek that give, give us that north star, here's where you're at no shade, here's where you could be. And then creating that pathway for us to be better and do better. Those are the kind of partners that I think help us reimagine how we can deliver in a very, very impactful way.
David Vanalek: (
You may have, touched upon, this next question with your last response. We were kind of talking about, the dashboards and the metrics and that sort of thing. But I'm curious if your response is a little bit different here, but in terms of, what is that first step to understanding or analyzing basically how your organization is, is falling short in a particular area or spot and deciding how, and where to look for for those solutions.
Lori Pon: (
So I think it starts with your vendors, thought leadership. It starts with internal thought leadership it with how your organizational change management. You cannot underestimate the importance that if your UX is not amazing, your CX will never be amazing. So we're totally leaned in on organizational change management. We identify our user communities. They're at the table in business requirement sessions. We try to limit the techie talk. So it's at the table, my team's at the table. The business is at the table and we're co-developing requirements. So the voice of the business is, imbued from the beginning. And because I was in the business as a line leader, I know who to pull into these sessions. Finance is at the table. And I think the difference is when you go to look at is the tech effective, we're looking at cycle time, we're looking at leakage, we're looking at things like NPS and some, what we've seen iterate with our partners is they start out and the tech is really cool, but the dashboard is a latent follower.
Lori Pon: (
It's a fast follower. So I'm first at the table, say I'll alpha for you, I'll beta for you. And that gives us a voice. And that's really very helpful. We baed, analytics for our bidirectional texting vendor. We baed their mobile app where we baed, sentiment analysis overall. And then we're alpha testing currently When we're in our sentiment analysis tool. So these, this is like me going back and forth with you on a claim. I have my little queue I have in the gooey. I've maybe got a hundred texts active. There's a badge on the text of its negative sentiment. So that tells me right away, I have a service recovery that I need to make and what we've done in helping our vendor partner partner, being the key is we talked to 'em about the importance of cascading results from the high level.
Lori Pon: (
So the chief line officer all the way down to the, to the user level, because pre, when we first signed up with them, they were really a startup at the very precipice of the tool. And we didn't have that level of data. So I couldn't really tell if David was really using the tool effectively, like you have 150 claims in your backlog and you have 10 tax. I couldn't really tell, I could tell that you were active on your 10 tax, but I couldn't tell the opportunity. you have lost opportunity. Yes. The law. So we're starting to get it down to that law on the digital payment side, we're looking at days to cash. We're looking at things like, NPS when we digitally pay you. And when we don't, it's like, it's a mic drop moment.
Lori Pon: (
And now we're starting to put those dashboards. My team produces the dashboards and we put it in front of line leadership, but we're starting to do these ad hoc review sessions to make sure operational leadership understands what we're delivering and that it speaks to the voice of business. And then we're sharing the artifacts with our partners and saying, this is what you need to create. Cuz they created this really. I think what they thought was a really cool gooey it's Google Looker. It had all these widgets, but the widgets were like rocket science. I'm like, you're you got a little nuclear reactor here. And it did not resonate with our operational leaders. And I went back to our partner. I'm like, I think we might wanna retool this. I need you to tell me how often our leaders are logging into analytics, which was abysmal.
Lori Pon: (
And I said, I think we're hearing from the voice of the customer, this isn't resonating. And we started to talk about the individual widgets. It was on a 24 hour clock, seven days a week who uses a 24 clock. We all don't work. At least I'd love to say I could work that 24 hours a day, but there were some things that I think were leadership was getting into these widgets and they weren't making sense. And then we worked with our partner and we're now starting to alpha. And I love having that voice at the table. And those are some of the things that drive the needle for me as a leader, being able to drive where we have friction and help shape the roadmap is really cool.
David Vanalek: (
Yeah. And, I know that kind of feeds into to the kind of the next theme, which is, from not a vendor, but a partner, but what separates or, elevates a partner to kind of rise to the cream of the crop. And, how does that partner then become indispensable to, you as a claims slate? you just gave an example of that, but we'd love to hear more.
Lori Pon: (
I have one key example. So we can text you from our Estamatic system. Like we wanna see photos of your house or your car. We'll text you from our FinTech vendor to accept your digital payment. And then we text you from our texting tool to go back and forth on your claim. That's three different touchpoints for one claim. God help you. If you have an injury, cuz then you're getting a text or an injury adjuster connecting with you on the injury. Cuz we specialize certain components of the claim. So I've talked to our bidirectional texting vendor, like, listen, we're not as agile as you. You're a tech company, can't you go and partner with our FinTech and bring in this ecosystem of payment tax into your platform. And the cool thing is like maybe six months down the road, I was talking to our insurer tech and then I met with, I went to ITC last year and I met with the CEO of our FinTech and they now have in beta sending their, our FinTech is sending their text messages through our bidirectional texting partner.
Lori Pon: (
So we're eliminating one touch point, which is more friction for the customer. Like, wait, what text are you sending your payment from? So we're seeing that. And I met with our bidirectional texting partner yesterday. So they're inure tech and they're starting to build relationships with our Salvos. Our rental companies think about when you have a car insurance claim or even a home claim, you want mitigation, they're starting to build relationships faster than we can to key partners. And what's really cool is we'll be able to leverage that tech and I'll have zero I.T Lift I'll pay for it probably in contract, but net net I'll have zero I.T Lift. So we're starting to really lean into partners that have that easy plug and play accelerator. Cuz then I don't have the lift. All I'll have is the executing the use cases to make sure it makes sense for us, but those are some of the things that we look for in partners.
Lori Pon: (
And when I just even thinking about when we had the bake off, so we had this bake off between two texting partners, one was way bigger and the other one was, was the startup and their CEO had done consulting for us. So, he understood insurance big time. And really the other tool was probably more technically advanced, but this other vendor won out because they really understood insurance and their roadmap was very focused on insurance. And so even though the other vendor, I think some of the things that they had, like RCS, a lot of cool functionality, we picked the other, we picked the startup. And so it's not always how sexy your tech is. It's about your roadmap. It's about you understanding the business. I've been, I've been a producer and I've been on the claim side and claim people like people that understand the use case and the business.
Lori Pon: (
And so those are just some of the things that I've, seen us leaning in, even to startups, if their future looks like it's going to align to friction points in our organization. So right. Yeah. It's been kind of cool because I haven't seen the tech really I've been with AAA over 15 years. I haven't seen the tech side of the business really accelerate. Like it has the past four to five years and COVID, O's been pretty epic, but that's really cool. And those kind of vendors that present that agility and that forward thinking thought and really understand your industry. Yeah. You have a said hello.
David Vanalek: (
Right, Yeah. it's definitely like when, I recall when my prior company we'd look at some of these different technologies, as always hearken back to that, marketing ad from apple back in the late seventies of simplicity as the ultimate sophistication, and it's not about necessarily all the bells and whistles. It's actually, how do you make it from, from a user perspective easy enough, but then also a deep understanding of the business itself, to then really elevate that opportunity so that you can bring that value, to the customer in terms of can where we're at in June of 2022 things obviously have been significantly different from March of 2020 till now. and these types of conferences it took place and been taking place for a while during the pandemic. can you share any type of innovations that, you and your team, BA basically implemented to maybe circumvent some of the challenges associated, with these times?
Lori Pon: (
Sure. So I let our contact center for five years from 2016 to 2021, our innovation team and a fast track adjusting unit auto home, fairly simplistic claims, very low liability. So prior to COVID 0% of the 200 people that reported to me other than my innovation team here and there worked remotely. So in March of 2020, like most of us, we all went home and the contact center journey was pretty crazy but my background was project management. I managed it like a project, right? and I raised my hand, I actually incubated teams for our contact center and really laid out the use cases of how you would use teams. And the same thing occurred when the adjusters went home, they were remoting into with their personal laptops, which was not elegant. It wasn't dual monitor. And so a couple of things that we did is prior to COVID, we had been looking for a texting partner, cuz we knew the ubiquity of the phone.
Lori Pon: (
IOT, we had to communicate with customers using text phone tag is so hashtag 1980. So we knew we had to get that out. So we incubated it in my quick claim unit. So we had a control group control group, a use one tool control group B use use, or I should say group a use one tool group B used another tool and group C was our control group using nothing. We compared the results. We knew net net texting was better period in a and B were awesome C lagged, right cycle time, things like NPS. So we were gonna like, what I would say kind of like drip it into prod, like pick artificial damage first. Then we were gonna pick home then injury, which is so the complexity was gonna rise as we proved and vetted out the tool.
Lori Pon: (
So what we ended up doing is like, wait a minute, we cannot drip this in. So we did what I would call the light switch approach. So we picked the vendor, we signed the contract by may. So I was incubating it in February. We vetted it for a month, vetted it by March, signed the contract by the end of may, we had that puppy rolled out by September, the first week in September to 900 users across different companies cuz you just had to do it. I led the project. I probably have a few more grays, but you had to get it out. You had to, we had to have this tool because adjusters were checking their voicemail at the company phone. I mean, how non-customer centric is that not to be able to reach your adjuster in a really impactful way. And then on the digital payment side, we were gonna drip in payments auto fiscal damage first then casually.
Lori Pon: (
And what we decided to do is said, okay, we're gonna test this in November of 2020 for one month where we run auto fiscal damage to some medical payments through, we did it one month. We wanted to see it over month in for the financials. And we rolled it out in December to, in one of our primary claim systems to like 600 people. Oh wow. So full move to production. Yeah. I mean like get ready, like buckle lot butter cup. This is going in, I mean, that's kind of how we were and I just think, but the attention to OCM is really at the top of my list, we had all of our communities identify, we had manager training sessions and I think if you have a reimagined way of approaching change, we worked with consultancy. We adopted their framework and we were very leaned in on action planning and business readiness.
Lori Pon: (
And if you have those pieces in place and then at then another thing that we don't do is we don't set it and forget it plop and drop whatever you wanna call it. When we finished our implementation, we started to do these Rosebud thorn sessions. So those design thinking sessions, what works well doesn't work so well, if you could change anything or change anything, what would it be? And that gave us our north star, how we needed to iterate. And we started the tweak we pulled in our FinTech. We pulled in our ensure tech and we do these sessions. But one thing that I really like about our insured tech and our FinTech is they get us involved in design thinking. And so like with our alpha pilot, with our inure tech they'll show us even very, very early storyboards.
Lori Pon: (
So before they bake the cake, it's like almost gonna be put in the oven. They put it in front of us and we're really able to talk about what's gonna work and what isn't. And a lot of times they scrap stuff because there' some very smart people that are working at our insured tech, but they've never handled a claim and it doesn't make sense. What is being put in front. It looks cool. It looks really cool. Some of the ideation, but when you put it in front of claim professionals, like we would'n use that. So it saves them development time. And so we talk a lot about predevelopment ideas and concepts and by the time it gets to prod we're normally we normally have alpha or Bated it for them. So yeah, I like being in that seat of influencing and letting them influence how we can improve. So it's that great relationship, you
David Vanalek: (
Know? Yeah. kind of a follow up to that cuz you mentioned kind of the OCM and kind of, the claim professionals and we wouldn't, we wouldn't use that. sometimes it's yeah, they definitely wouldn't use it because it doesn't fit, you know the needs of the business or, the process or the workflow would have you. but sometimes it's well no you gotta push 'em, you gotta nudge 'em right. And then they go, oh yeah, this is fantastic. I don't know how I lived without, this particular opportunity maybe if you have any like highlights or best suggestions for how have you found a bit like the most effective tools from in terms of like organizational change management with claims professionals in particular, given how, by the nature of the role, sometimes they tend to be a little cynical, myself included.
Lori Pon: (
Well, I was going to was gonna say that. So I've been a producer in a prior life and underwriter and I've been on the claims side for the longest side of my career. Our claim team can be they're tough customers, right? I mean, seriously tough customers, tough audience, tough to convince. We started to gamify a lot of our innovations. So as an example, when we rolled out our digital payment platform and our texting platform, we gamified it the first 10 adjusters to a hundred text, a hundred digital payments, got a corporate award. And then we had them record Selfies, video selfies. And we do, we have a team in our claim.we have a claim academy team, which basically is a group of instructional designers and technical training experts. So instructional design and development experts, and they produce these really high quality videos.
Lori Pon: (
And so the 10 adjusters got these little noodle figures and there were these voiceovers of what does tech do for me? I'm your I'm speaking, sitting in a dusting desk. And we published this video and it was really popular because it was the voice of your colleague speaking to you instead of it being me or our chief claim officer. And then our chief loan officer will also record these like TikTok videos about what we're doing. So we've kind of changed the communication protocol. It's not so formal. And I think that's really resonated. And then some of the things that we'll do is we'll look at the metadata in some of our innovations and we'll bring in what we think are the doubters. And we're bringing them in and helping to try to, I guess, in a sense demystified myths. So urban legend. And then we also talk about why aren't you using it?
Lori Pon: (
Like what, help us understand why this doesn't work for you? Right. As an example, I was looking at our total loss numbers and we were at NPS of like 40, which on a good, day that's not good. Right? And then I saw total loss, NPS skyrocket, and I saw call the manager. I'm like, Hey, what are you doing? Help me understand. And what they did is they quit offering check. They do not leave a check. So if you have a total loss with us, you crash your car, we'll say, Hey, David, I can deposit this to your debit card or to your bank account, which will work better for you. I can get this like literally like that and your debit card, cuz it's Amex or visa or whatever. We can get it typically when we're on the call together. So total loss started leading with digital payment and their NPS went through the room and total loss. Typically everyone thinks our car is worth more than it is. And it's typically a long process. We have to get the title and their NPS is better than some of our other adjusting units. So yeah, sometimes the business is scrappy. They're doing things that I didn't even think about. So I took a page outta their book. I don't mind stealing shamelessly.
David Vanalek: (
That's awesome. no topic on, or no, question would be, without, talking about this particular piece which is the C-suite how do get that buying, from the Csuite cuz you can identify, critical business needs that will bring great solutions to your, insureds and policyholders and claimants. And it'll, create seamless experiences internally and you can have great organizational change management, but, you need that buyingfrom the Csuite. So, what do you do to seal the deal there?
Lori Pon: (
So one of the things I do is I write these one pagers and it's, you have to be really disappointed with these one pagers. So literally it starts, what is the solution? What is the alignment to our strategy? What is the benefit to the business, the customer and our internal adjusting community. So our end users and then there's the mini CBA. What's the cost? What KPIs do I think it's gonna impact? And it's, this is not a two fun exercise. Sometimes I wanna reduce it to two fun, but I don't. So, it's a one pager and it's basically my chief officers called it his elevator pitch to our C suite. So we have a portfolio steering committee and if it passes that sniff test. So I write the one pager. Typically I will have had several meetings with a prospective partner and will go through the use case.
Lori Pon: (
Sometimes I schedule, demos with our line of business leaders and put the tech in front of them, but it is a very curated demo. I wanna understand what use cases does the tech solve. I typically have a pretty good read cuz I've been over a lot of the lines other than property where, what it's going to potentially resolve, what friction it's going to reduce. And then by the time and I typically will have our partner pitch it to the innovation team. Cause by innovation team is staffed with team members that have handled claims. I have a sheet metal adjuster on my team. There's someone that's handled cat PIP liability claims. So I'll have them pitch to my internal team. And then it goes for prime time sometimes in front of our, senior team. So a lot of times I'm writing these papers, but I'll only write a paper if I think it's gonna be funded and the technology's impactful.
Lori Pon: (
So that really, really helps because what ends up happening is then we go to this five PowerPoint type methodology. When it goes in front of our portfolio steering committee, it can't be any more than five slides. Our CEO doesn't wanna see any more than five slides. So you have to be super curated. So typically that's the launching point to get the, my one page is typically the launching point to get it socialized across the organization. And then if we move into getting it in front of the portfolio steering committee, then we do the five page deck, but it starts off with that paper. because it's just enough to get kind of that general read on whether you're gonna get sponsored to move it forward.
David Vanalek: (
Got it. Yeah. No, that makes good sense. and I know we're.
Lori Pon: (
And then one of the other things I do is I find out who else is using it. So AAA is a Federation of 25 clubs across north America in, Canada. So I try to find out if any of the other clubs are using, cuz we love to use the other we love to think about what are they using, maybe we should use it, let me find. And then I'll just typically I'll, the other club, my innovation colleagues at the other clubs and say, Hey, what do you think about this? What's the, what's the word on the street? And so I do a little bit of homework and then I'll, I'll write in the bottom of the CBA Soandso is using it too. So, and so is using it too, so that doesn't hurt.
David Vanalek: (
Create a little bit of peer pressure
Lori Pon: (
There. Yeah. I have to do my internal homework. Yeah,
David Vanalek: (
Yeah, absolutely.
Lori Pon: (
Little bit, of inspector cruso.
David Vanalek: (
well I know we're coming up at the end of our time here, so one final question and, it's not on here, but listening to you with all these incredible, thoughts and ideas I, wanna hear from you as the experts, in the claim innovation space for the next like 12, 24 months what do you see are kind of the biggest challenges there and what are you most hopeful about?
Lori Pon: (
So I really think that we have to understand the intersection of people, process technology and data, and how can we get from a detected repair to predict and prevent. So what I'm seeing across the landscape is how, and we're a membership organization. So we sell these memberships, we also sell insurance. How can we protect you against events that where we have the data to predict that something potentially bad could happen to you? Like, are there monitors like leak bots out there, in the demo hall. And I met them at, a conference and, they have this monitor that you can attach. It's really easy to engage. You just put it on one of the pipes in your house. You're I think it's to the water main talking my husband about I'm like, how do we do this? but it was really easy.
Lori Pon: (
See, I just didn't know where all this stuff was in the house and it monitors your water pressure. It can tell if you're likely to have a pipe burst and it sends literally to your cell phone, a heads up, you may wanna call a plumber. So literally you're paying for a $70 plumber call and not a $1,300 deductible on a water claim. could we use the connected car in a more reimagined way? Hey, you need to get service on your brakes. Your brakes are gonna go out. So we're working and my particular triple I sits in Dearborn, which is literally we're kitty corner to the Ford headquarters world headquarters. So how can we work with the different manufacturers to, and now there's embedded insurances and all that cool stuff out there, but how can we work even from a connected car perspective, to be more proactive about helping our members journey through life with less frustration, cuz I don't know about you, but a claim is very frustrating and never probably puts a smile on your face. So how can we do more in that space to be a partner with our insureds, we're looking at whether, how can we message out to you if we think an event's gonna hit you or your family protect first yourself and your family, but try to protect your property maybe you can park your car in the garage, if there's a hail event and take the other car where you're going, it's those kinds of things that we're trying to do more proactively to be a better partner with our insureds.
David Vanalek: (
Yeah. That's, a fantastic point to, being on the claim side for years, that's one thing it was, we were on claims was always a huge advocate for risk mitigation and loss control so that there's never even a claim in the first place, that makes claims, the most happy. well that was, that was fantastic. Thank you, Lori. I know we're at the end of our, time, but if there are any questions out there, we'd love to field them and I'll see, what the response might be.
Audience Member 1: (
So you're talking about the level and so you were in, a company where business claims is part. All right. It's so it's the most, you make the most impacting customer experience more policyholder.
Lori Pon: (
Yeah. Better retention. Yeah. That's so tough. I used to be an underwriter and I was on the sales side. I was an operations manager with Geico and I had so much more tech, so much more funding and we see the same thing at our company. Sales is first, we're a big CRM. It's going through sales in our club first because they're the revenue side of the business, but we're having some more success. It's always great for one of our senior leaders to file a claim and experience the journey, the customer journey. so that's always helpful. Right. And then I do think that with some of the other players coming into the insurance space, so you've got Elon Musk. Could he be any more innovative? Right. And he's out there saying a claim, doesn't have to be a hard thing and we're gonna get rid of all of this back and forth. And this negotiation he's making it basically seamless. He's got basically insurance, the repair facility. I mean, could it be any more kind of concierge? Right. So I think we are starting to see the impact that claims has on retention and we're seeing more focus, but not the focus I would like, we're still not there. So I'm feeling your pain, I work
David Vanalek: (
With the other side of the,
Lori Pon: (
Oh yeah. Chris Reed is my good buddy. we auto shops. Yes. Yes. So we still see the major investment on the revenue side and I get it. I was a producer. I get it, but we also are starting to see that we are not delivering the same experience differentiated in hyper personalized experience as some of the other tech. So we've got to put some investments. So I'm, we just did a visioning session in Chicago and all the C-suite Cape digital marketing sales. I was really surprised like 35 executives with the claim team. And it gave me hope. And when they asked me what I expect out of EML, my hope is that we take all of these aspirations and I see a Gantt of where it's going to actually be implemented. And I'm like, okay, I have to be brave in this session. And so that was kind of my parting words. Like I need to see action. And they're having a meeting today that I'm missing about where do we take it in the future? So I'm hopeful, but at the end of the day, I feel like I'm the show me state, please show me. So we'll see. But I'm feeling you there.
David Vanalek: (
Great. And any other questions for Lori? All right. Well Lori, thank you very much. Uh, thank you audience.