Smiles are free

Do you remember when McDonald’s had free smiles on their menu? I remember asking my mother why they would put that there. She said they wanted their customers to know that they really cared about providing good friendly service.

I haven’t looked at their menu board for quite a while but the next time I visit, I’m going to check to see if it’s still there. My guess is the smiles are either gone or the employees forgot to read it. As you’ve no doubt noticed, customer service is lousy these days. I’ve really found over the last 10 years that it’s taken a dramatic change for the worse. Why it’s happening I’m not exactly sure but one thing I do know is that we deserve better.



As a vendor of insurance products, I find that brokerages and insurers have come to expect the same poor service from most of their software providers. Some vendors take 30 days to respond to support calls or emails, others go out of their way to make their data difficult to access, some even threaten to lock down their databases, and one vendor has moved their development and support south of the border. 



Brovada was formed to solve problems like these. For instance, 5 years ago brokers were being asked to work within an insurer’s portal. Although these insurers provided the portals to improve service, it was viewed as offloading work to the brokers. Many insurers quickly partnered with solutions such as Nexisys to automate the keying of data. Other insurers, slower to provide similar features, are now expediting the adoption of these products. 



Yet there are still some that have no roadmap to provide similar functionality. These insurers will eventually notice a dramatic decrease in volume. When one considers that a modern day broker competes against a direct writer – such as a bank whose annual IT investment is more than all the P&C carriers combined – the broker can’t afford to deal with an insurer providing such poor service. 



Brovada recently put on a wine and cheese event in BC. The purpose of the event was to gather feedback on improvements to our products, assist our clients in understanding how to utilize our products to their fullest potential, and to simply say thanks for being a client. The event was a great hit and we look forward to doing more functions like that in the future.



I was astonished by the reaction to our event in BC. It was as if the audience was in shock. They couldn’t believe what their vendor was asking of them: to participate in shaping the tools they needed, to push us, their vendor, to do more, and to engage in improving their productivity. All of this with a glass of wine, some cheese, and best of all free smiles.