Author: Ron Berg and Paul Peeples
The ACT Disaster Preparedness Work Group has been reconstituted to update the 2006 ACT Disaster Plan document. While many of the recommendations are excellent and still on point, technology and customer expectations have evolved—or maybe we could say leapt forward a light year—so a refresh of some of the language and strategies is in order.
While the trio of hurricanes in the fall of 2017 certainly brought disaster preparedness to the foreground, catastrophes strike localities and entire regions every year. These drive agencies to get ahead and stay ahead on responsiveness. The updated ACT Disaster Plan will speak to nine aspects of response strategy: agency office issues, agency staff processes, carrier interaction, communications, customer-facing concerns, technology-specific needs, adjuster interaction and coordination, association assistance, and value-added services.
The work group—now at 17 members—is populated with ACT participants from across the nation, and we are happy to welcome others. The focus of the Disaster Plan document goes beyond coastal issues. It will address preparation as a whole, which can include wildfires, flooding, snow and ice, tornados and earthquakes and be applicable to catastrophes beyond those. The idea is to create a document that is both comprehensive and actionable.
Though the Disaster Plan is put out by the Agents Council for Technology, it doesn't focus just on computers and clicks. It will address the full needs of agencies, including employee concerns—their homes, their families, their transportation.
One of our challenges is keeping the richness of the document while parsing out the best practices so they are granular but still digestible. You could potentially write a book on this topic, so our goal is to keep it manageable, so agents want to read it and want to use it.
One of the greatest stresses agents today feel is information overload. There is simply not enough time to digest all the excellent information available to us. The Disaster Preparedness Work Group understands this from personal experience, so the Disaster Plan will be designed in consumable segments—on aspects like Agency Office Issues, Customer Communications, Carrier Interaction, and others. The work group is dedicated to creating the most usable, clear document possible. For those not inclined to handle a binder full of papers, this will be a welcome manual. Chock-full of actionable items, it will run about 20 pages and be available online. We are shooting for publication before spring. Highlights and snippets will also be made available throughout the year via IA Magazine, as well as social media and state association outlets. It will be available for download as well.
We're thinking about how we can motivate ACT members who may totally agree that disaster preparedness is valuable but who haven't pushed it to the top of their to-do list yet. Often, it isn't until an agency gets caught unprepared that it begins to take a disaster plan seriously. We tend to marginalize preparation; then, something happens, and everybody says, “We should have been prepared for this!" Our goal is to make this document appealing to even those agencies not in disaster-prone areas, so they use it before they have a proverbial five-alarm fire.
One of our main focal points is customer service and how that can happen before, during and after an event. In many ways, new forms of technology make that more possible than ever. Text and email blasts, robo-calls and social media give us multiple ways to push out the same emergency-related content to reach the widest customer audience. The Florida Association of Insurance Agents has updated its own disaster preparedness guide, and that will serve as one good reference point for our review.
The Disaster Plan update will also look at newly available systems that can help agencies pick up in the moments after a catastrophe and start running. Those include mobile, mini cell towers that phone service providers set up; cloud-based access to files and carrier sites; and remote work options via mobile devices so the loss of desktops and servers isn't crippling.
Not only has technology rocketed forward; expectations have as well. Customers now assume their agents are operating in the 21st century, and they have proven to have little patience when they are trying to make a claim or get information in a crisis. Meeting those expectations is a solid retention strategy.
The work group is aware that money is an object, so this plan proposes real solutions that are possible to implement. It will be an excellent resource, and we hope agencies will take a look at it and find the sections most relevant to them…then act on it before a disaster makes it a priority.
To participate in the Disaster Preparedness Work Group, contact Ron Berg, executive director of the Agents Council for Technology
Paul Peeples is vice president and chief information officer of the Florida Association of Insurance Agents (FAIA) and a member of the ACT Committee along with ACT's Disaster Preparedness Work Group.