This session will provide an overall economic outlook of the property/casualty insurance industry. This session will include a high-level look at industry trends and disrupters. The always-popular Robert Hartwig, Ph.D., will provide important insights that will help you manage your company’s risk.

Robert Hartwig, Ph.D.

Director, Center for Risk & Uncertainty Management
University of South Carolina

Busy professionals are buried under a continuing stream of useful and useless email. Without a system for getting “control of the beast,” professionals spend much of their work – and personal – time spinning their wheels. If you would like to get control of your email “beast,” you should attend this program led by Randy Dean, author of the Amazon bestseller “Taming the Email Beast.” Randy shares strategies for effective email management, organization, and prioritization that have helped thousands of business professionals regain control and sanity with their email activities Enhance your email productivity and efficiency with today by walking away with immediately usable tips and techniques.

Randall Dean

Time & Email Management Author & Speaker
Randall Dean Consulting & Training, LLC

Customer experience is an essential component of a transformational journey and is interwoven throughout Strategy Meets Action’s three transformational areas for property/casualty insurers: digital business, foundational technologies, and transformational technologies. Customer experience is an organizational journey that begins with “flipping the lens” from the traditional inside-out, customer-service driven focus to an outside-in, empathy-driven customer experience focus. Join this session to understand the eight critical areas to address in your customer experience transformation. Deb Smallwood will share SMA's latest research on customer experience investment, maturity, and adoption; highlight use cases; and conclude with a call to action.

Deb Smallwood

Founder & Chief Executive Officer
Strategy Meets Action

These days, customers expect a customer experience that’s personalized and on demand. How do insurance companies cultivate deeply connected – and profitable – experiences for customers without giving away too much? How do agents provide a tailored experience without getting crushed by the burden of client engagement? The questions can be overwhelming, but there is good news. You already have everything you need to keep your clients and the solution doesn’t require expensive technology. During this interactive session, customer experience expert and bestselling author of “Keep Your Customers” Ali Cudby will help attendees develop simple steps that deliver long-term, lucrative loyalty.

Ali Cudby

Chief Executive Officer
Your Iconic Brand

During this session, Kevin Rall will discuss how other industries are setting new expectations for customer experience, how the insurance industry is responding, and how disruptors and innovators in insurance are leveraging technology to establish new market expectations for prospects, policyholders, claimants, and agents. Specific examples that highlight how new technologies and the rethinking of processes and products are changing the insurance experience will be shared. Kevin will review the most promising emerging and traditional technologies and highlight some best practices for creating and sustaining an awareness of customer experience and expectations.

Kevin Rall

Vice President, Research & Consulting
Novarica

“No one wants a drill. What they want is the hole.” - Manhattan Mutual Life advertisement, 1946.

Insurance perennially ranks poorly in customer satisfaction when compared to other industries. In the case of home insurance, the underlying need is for shelter, but traditional home insurance merely provides funds after damage to shelter. In this session, attendees will learn how newer insurtechs leverage sensors in a connected-home environment to evolve the customer experience from salvaging a broken home to subscribing to preventive maintenance.

Steve Walsh

Director
PwC

Vivek Paharia

Director
PwC

Now more than ever, companies need to build much deeper ties to customers because of the technology that has enabled frequent, low-friction, customized digital interactions. Instead of waiting for customers to come directly to insurance companies, carriers need to flip their mindsets and meet their customers the moment their needs arise, sometimes even earlier. Through this shift of doing business, insurance carriers can create value for themselves, their customers, and society. This session will dive into examples in which telematics can provide better touchpoints with customers to make engagement less disruptive and more meaningful.

Katie DeGraaf

Director
Arity

Ross Reichardt

Product Manager
Arity

For all the industry talk about being customer focused, few companies are truly are. It’s all too easy for organizations to become inward focused and think about their own activities rather than what their customers are going through. Andrea Olson, author of “No Disruptions” and CEO of Pragmadik, will discuss how organizations need to step back from their assumptions and shift their strategies to center on recognizing, responding, and rewarding customer-centric actions and behaviors.

Andrea Olson

Chief Executive Officer
Pragmadik

The amount of information that bombards us daily too frequently obscures true insight. Intelligence should drive better innovation, but unless it is strategically collected and used, it functions like an engaging distraction. Innovation starts with discovery – where an innovator pinpoints an important customer problem to solve – and smart companies intertwine customer intelligence throughout their innovation processes. This presentation will discuss how to effectively capture ground-level intelligence by asking the right questions and how to identify undiscovered customer needs to build innovation and move leaps and bounds beyond your competition.

Andrea Olson

Chief Executive Officer
Pragmadik

This session is designed to help participants understand customers and the importance of building a cohesive experience that is truly customer centric. This session will cover how customer experience and expectations are evolving and how to harness the power of customers’ needs while building meaningful, memorable, and stand-out user experiences.

Christy Hogan Hutchinson

Vice President, Strategy & Planning
Magnani

It is human for us to panic when we don’t get the results we want. We get defensive and are not able to hear someone else. When someone is disappointed, learn how to be open and curious to hear what they are saying. It is important to take responsibility and to ask questions so that you can create a win-win solution for all. During this session, attendees will learn how to deal with a difficult customer and how to ensure your customer experiences end on a positive note.