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It’s Halloween. It’s dark. Ghosts and ghouls are drifting through the streets trick-or-treating for candy. A 12-year-old boy, dressed up as Batman, is counting his candy and chattering excitedly in the car about the Halloween party his parents just collected him from. Suddenly, a ghastly event occurs, and they rear-end the car in front. The airbags deploy, glass shatters, and dust from the collision contaminates the boy’s candy jar.
As an insurer, what would you do in this situation?
Obviously, the most pressing concern is human safety, followed by removal of the vehicles and the organization of alternative transportation. But, would you do anything about the trick-or-treat candy?
An employee at PURE Insurance did when this exact situation occurred last year. They dealt with the immediate post-collision situation, and then secretly ordered a candy delivery to turn up at the boy’s home, which prompted a “gushing message” of thanks from the shaken 12-year-old whose frightful Halloween had been somewhat salvaged.
“At PURE Insurance, we encourage our staff to carry out on-the-spot extemporaneous thinking. It’s never just about the four corners of an insurance policy. We’re always asking what we can do on a human element to help and delight our members,” explained Michael Taylor, senior vice president and deputy chief claims officer at PURE Insurance.
“We place huge value upon emotional intelligence. In fact, we have a pre-employment screening process to measure the emotional intelligence of prospective employees, and then, once people join the company, we provide additional training to further enhance emotional and empathic awareness.”
For member-owned PURE Insurance, the candy lies in the sweet delight of its members. Its focus is always centered around the experience of the high net worth individuals they serve, even if that means forgoing small enhancements to operational or transactional efficiency.
The company strives for an alignment of interests between their members, their investors and their employees. It works around the premise that a switched-on, happy and emotionally intelligent employee is going to be much more likely to delight the member, who in turn is more likely to tell other prospective members, broker partners and intermediaries how happy they are with the service, Taylor told Insurance Business.
He added: “It becomes a self-fulfilling circle, because if the employees understand the mantra and they delight the membership, the members themselves are going to become an engine of growth for us. That’s partly what we mean by a true alignment of interests.”
