Communicating with Clients: september Protection Forum Part 3
This is the third post in our series focusing on the great discussions from our September Protection Forum. In this session, participants spkoe to Phil Zeidler from DeadHappy about communicating clearly with customers, DeathTech, and adding flexibility to products so they can adapt as clients’ lives change.
Would you look to extend the type of cover you provide further than death and near death into the protection of income or anything like that?
We’re very much focused in death-related services and see our niche as Death-Tech and don’t see ourselves going into other financial products.
Phil Zeidler:
Philosophically, we’re more likely to focus more on other death-related services. So we’ve already got the digital will. We actually see our niche bizarrely, there’s this thing called Death Tech now, and we say that facing into death and getting really good decisions and then making sure these things can happen in the eventuality of death is probably where we’re focussed on. So we don’t see ourselves broadening into a greater sort of financial products, particularly they really are the death and near death products are where I think we’re likely to stay.
What was behind the decision to go with pay-as-you go?
Stephen Pickering:
I remember when I sort of first saw some of the adverts on Instagram and it was marketed, I don’t know if it’s still being marketed as this, as pay-as-you-go life insurance. And so I just wanted to know what was behind that, was that just the fact that the life insurance premiums, as they pretty much all are paid monthly? Or is it to do with the kind of the rolling nature that you’d mentioned that your policy has?
We wanted to have a term that the public understood and that they know they can pay for as long as they like and stop at any time and then come back without any issues. We had payment holidays or temporarily dropping cover built into our plans to have that increased flexibility for people.
Phil Zeidler:
It was trying to find a term that the public understood that they know that they can pick it up, they can pay for a month of cover and you know what, if they want to stop that, they can stop there and they can just drop the cover down. And that’s fine. It doesn’t mean they’ve got to go through the whole process again. So the policy is designed to flex to meet their needs.
So it’s that sort of mentality of just saying, “look, this is a product that will meet your needs and you’re not buying something on a fixed basis for 20 years.” And if you suddenly, meet a bit of a difficult time. Now, of course, this was all before the pandemic where everyone’s got very used to getting payment holidays and so forth, and it’s now a sort of thing that would be ordinary. But effectively we had it built into our product the ability to give people payment holidays at any time or just drop their cover for a while or whatever it might be.
So that was the intention from the language of our pay-as-you-go is trying to speak in such a way that they understood it was like, Okay, yeah, I’ve got this and that’s great, and I’m not committed for forever on this because otherwise that feels like a big decision.”
The product also has a different approach in itself because of the flexibility which our systems have been built to support.
Phil Zeidler:
It is a change in the product because it is flexible. I know you’ve got GIs and stuff, but they’re rarely used and accessible mainly, I’m not sure why. You might be able to answer why the GI is not at the forefront. Why do we even put conditions on people changing their cover?
I don’t quite understand it, but I’ve always assumed its a tech challenge from the insurers, if you’ve got people changing their policy cover all the time then suddenly you got a massive administrative challenge with insurers, which they’re not equipped for, which of course we don’t, we built the systems so we can do it. The pay-as-you-go speaks to those sorts of flexibilities that we can deliver.
How often are you going down the underwriting route? Are you finding a lot of millennials having health issues or not meeting your criteria?
Setul Mehta:
If I think about how you said your client bank is generally millennials, how much are you finding or how much of the proportion are probably sort of going down the underwriting route? Are you finding that those who are going off-piste outside of your core straightforward route?
And is that leading to, and I think I read it was LifeSearch that you used, is that then leading to the consumer continuing that journey and taking out the policy? Do you have anything around, if it doesn’t fit your world, it’s good that you’ve got a route out and is that following through? And are you finding a lot of millennials are having health issues or not fitting within your criteria?
At the moment our criteria is quite strict so we are finding a lot of people we can’t cover. We’ve got signposting that we’re testing through LifeSearch, and while the contact rate is high very few people are actually buying cover when they’re sent down that route because they want a digital process.
Phil Zeidler:
So at the moment, we have pretty strict criteria. So we do have a fair few people that we can’t cover because we’ve got a short question set inevitably and that means that you’ve got to be fairly brutal with that. So we do have quite a lot of people who don’t. And as you say, we’ve sort of got a signposting through which we’re testing with LifeSearch.
I want to be a little bit careful about what I say here, because I’m not sure we really understand what the challenge is, and I’m meeting with the guys this week again. But we’ve been going that for a few months and a relatively very low number of those people actually go on and buy. So we get a lot of them actually going through. The contact rate is high. All of that works. Very few of them are buying. Now there are lots of reasons– it might just be that we’ve still got teething problems around the process and all the rest of it.
But one thesis is actually, and I know we’ve had some direct feedback, a lot of people just cannot and have no wish to engage in a long, drawn-out process on the phone. It’s just not how they want to buy stuff. They just want to buy digitally. They just want to get it done.
How do you hypothesize DeadHappy would approach an Income Protection campaign?
If I was to give you a guess on how we would approach IP it would probably involve our two characters in some kind of humorous situation where the cover becomes important to show people what the cover actually does.
Phil Zeidler:
I’ll give you a guess of how we might do it. I mean, there’s a heavy, heavy caveat, Robert. I’ve no idea whether it would be at all successful. But I guess the way we would do it, and this is the sense of how and why we’ve created these, these two characters, one of which is a cynic. And we would have our characters of Mick and Tel, one of them talking about one of them talking about Income protection, the other one pooh-poohing and saying, “No, don’t need that, I’ll be fine” or whatever.
Then you create some bizarre incident. You know where they end up being off, leg in plaster at the hospital, whatever. Or maybe they were both in the accident, and one of them clearly laughing or being completely financially fine. The other one just, having a hard time. And it is difficult, making light of the fact, just drawing that contrast, because what you’re doing is you’re just putting a scenario in front of people, a third party scenario, which hopefully will make them smile but will also make them think, “OK, that’s what that product actually does.”
It’s about getting customers to understand that they’re not just buying a piece of paper with some numbers on it but an experience.
I mean, for me, I suppose if you think about what we do and the reason that sits behind death-wish is it’s about bringing alive what the product’s actually going to do for you. So it’s getting customers to really imagine they’re not just buying a bit of paper with a number on it, they’re actually buying it effectively an experience, albeit one that’s post their death for their loved ones. I would imagine we would approach it the same way with income protection. It’s like, get them to think about “OK, so if they were off for two years, what wouldn’t they be able to do, you know? And therefore, how do you solve it?” So I guess that’s probably the way we would try and you would create that sort of for want of a better word, that sort of mini calculator of experiences and things they’d miss.
