Brightside's Mark Cliff on becoming a digital broker

- By Mark Cliff
- 24 Apr 2018
- Indicative reading time: 1 minute

Need to know

Brokers might need help from experts to speak young people’s digital language
Robotics can help deliver back-office activities and improve response time
Letting robots do the work of robots and humans do the work of humans makes sense for operations

Mark Cliff, executive chairman of Brightside, explains how brokers can make the most of the digital world.

Peter Hubbard, insurance éminence grise and chairman of the Co-op’s general insurance business, called last year for broking to embrace the digital revolution.

Peter was bemoaning – in his inimitable style – the lack of digital experience within broking and argued that brokers will struggle if they continue to turn a blind eye to the opportunities of the digital world.

To coin a phrase, ‘I agree with Peter’. In fact, I agree with him so much that I’m reinventing Brightside as a digital broker.

Starting with the front end, customers, especially younger ones now use digital as their primary source of communication. You need the right equipment to plug into their conversations but you also require people within your business who know how to talk to customers in this way.

To be fair, insurance broking is not a natural repository for these skills, so you may have to bring in outside experts to help you build the process to provide a tailored customer experience with your brand across multiple channels and mobile devices.

It can make a big difference to your Trustpilot scores and it can vastly increase your customer knowledge. This could help tick up your policy count.

What’s good for the front end is also good for the back. Robotics can be brought in to deliver those deeply unsexy back office activities such as documentation, printing and despatch.

Robotics has the potential to reduce both cost and error rates. And by taking out the human variable, it can significantly improve your response time. Using robotics for non-value added activities will also make your brokerage more scalable as an organisation – shorthand for delivering further growth.

I’m not about to replace myself with a digital hologram, at least not just yet, and we are still learning how to work harmoniously with artificial intelligence and technology.

But we do know that letting robots do the work of robots and humans do the work of humans makes sense for operations and a ‘next, not now’ mindset remains vital to maintain our forward momentum.