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American History Tellers Podcast Does Series On The Great Chicago Fire

The excellent American History Tellers podcast has just done a three-part series on the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. If you haven't listened to the show before, this is not a dry recitation of history. The host places the listener in the scene being described and relays the story of what happened from the viewpoints of people who were there.

The Chicago fire series barely mentions insurance, but it's a good reminder of why we have building and fire safety codes. In the fall of 1871, Chicago had all the key ingredients for a fire disaster:

• Thousands of wood frame buildings
• A drought
• High winds

Reminder: It's Peak Hurricane Season

Lynne McChristian of the Insurance Information Institute has an important reminder today:

Peak hurricane season has arrived. ...

Mid-August through the end of October historically is when most hurricanes form. Remember HIM? Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria made landfall between mid-August and the end of September in 2017. Two Category 4 storms and one Category 5 occurred in a matter of weeks in a season predicted to be slightly above average.Last year’s Hurricane Michael hit in late October. While this year’s latest prediction is for a “near-average season,” hurricane researchers will tell you that it only takes one hurricane making landfall near you to break the law of averages.

To that list, I would add:

We Interrupt This Blog For An Important Announcement

 

THE BOSTON RED SOX ARE THE
2018 WORLD SERIES CHAMPIONS!!!

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.

 

Do You Have Friday the 13th Insurance?

As you may have noticed, today is Friday, July 13. Friday the 13th is traditionally seen by some better safe than sorry superstitious individuals as a day when one must take care to avoid catastrophe terminal embarrassment certain doom being unlucky. We here at Big I New York are, of course, above such silliness. As a rule, our staff members are stupid reckless confident enough to go on about their lives as if it were any other day.

However, when if the predictable unexpected happens, insurance is there to say I-told-you-so pay for the financial fallout. Here, in no particular order, from the home office in Harpursville, New York, are the top five Friday the 13th hazards and how prudent superstitious individuals and businesses avoid big trouble an eternal curse OMG-what-were-you-thinking accidental loss:

Ladders. Look, if you insure contractors, you know all about New York's scaffold law. Many scaffold law claims involve someone standing on a ladder and suddenly finding himself subject to the earth's gravitational pull in a most unwelcome way. The ladder shifts, it moves, it spins, it does the hokey-pokey, whatever, and a worker falls and gets hurt. But what about if someone walks under the ladder? The ancient Egyptions caught onto this one 5,000 years ago. Fortunately, while many Commercial General Liability insurance policies exclude coverage for an employee falling off a ladder, relatively few exclude coverage when someone tempts fate by walking under one. So far.

Two ... No, Make That 15 Minutes With Tim: How a Research Question Gets Answered

​Watch the excitement of an insurance geek researching the answer to a member's question and finding out he told the member the wrong thing!

 

 

How To Be a Good Customer

This slideshare deck and Calvin speak for themselves. If you work with customers, you will appreciate this.

Tips from Calvin and Hobbes on how to be a good customer from Freshdesk Inc.

Comma On! Why Punctuation in Policies Matters

Photo by Gwydlon M. Williams. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.

​Insurance policies must be written and read carefully. There's a reason why your high school English teacher, whom you fondly referred to as Mrs. GrammarNazi, obsessed about punctuation. As Chris Amrhein explains, the presence or absence of a semi-colon can make the difference between a claim being covered or denied.

And you thought semi-colons were just for emojis. ;) 

If you pay strict attention to the rules of grammar, you just might get a claim denial reversed, as the agent in this story did. Think that might win you some customer loyalty?

I've been writing a lot about how policies are not all alike. I can't stress it enough: Insurance policies are contracts, contracts are collections of words, and how those words are spelled, arranged and separated determines how they should be understood. Those who pay close attention will have a tremendous competitive advantage over those who just sell price. No one cares about the price when a claim is denied.

So, dust off your grammar books and your copies of policy forms (you do have them, right?) and have them ready next time one of your clients is denied coverage. These infinitely dull tools may just make you a hero.

Related articles

Think All Policies Are the Same? (Part 1)

3 Steps To Better Newsletter Articles

Not long ago, a newsletter from an insurance agency landed in my email in box. The content in the newsletter appeared to be targeted at the agency’s personal lines clients. The article was all about coverage issues, which I think is a good thing. I’m all for trying to get insurance consumers to focus on the product they’re buying instead of how much they’re paying for it. The gecko and my gal Flo do plenty to emphasize the size of the premium. When independent insurance agents speak with their clients about coverage, they are doing the industry and the public a favor.

Unfortunately, this newsletter missed the mark. The more times I read it, the more I saw it as an example of what not to do. The author’s intentions were good; the execution was not. If your agency publishes a client newsletter, or regularly communicates with clients in some other way (which you should,) then here are some things to keep in mind:

Called On The Carpet: Recent Disciplinary Actions Against NY Producers

Photo by Grotuk. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.

 

The New York State Department of Financial Services released its latest periodic disciplinary actions report last week. Compared to some editions, this one was relatively short. A few insurers were taken to the woodshed for violating the laws pertaining to cancellation notices (balance sheets at 21st Century, AXA and MetLife are a tad lighter now than they were in April.)

The good news for agents and brokers was 1) not that many hearings and stipulations; and 2) a lot of the punishments were doled out to out-of-state producers.

NY Insurance Agents: Deep-Rooted, Growing, Challenged

Every couple of years, the Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America (a/k/a, “The Big I”) conducts an “agency universe study.” The study gets into very specific detail about the state of independent insurance agencies across the country. It’s a way of taking the temperature of the distribution channel. It also indicates trends. For example, for many years the number of independent agencies shrank due to retirements, consolidations, mergers, and so forth. However, the number appears to have stabilized, according to the last few studies.

IIABNY decided it wanted to dig deep into the 2014 AUS to find out specifically what’s going on here in New York. The association hired a research consulting firm to pull out the New York data and compare it to the data from outside the state. The results were interesting – encouraging in some ways, challenging in others.

Recruiting the Insurance Workforce of Tomorrow

I read the insurance trade press every day, and if there's one story I read over and over again, it's that the U.S. insurance industry is on the verge of a cataclysmic brain drain. The workforce is getting older (I'm 53 years old, which makes me one of the younger members,) and a lot of people in the industry are seeing visions of retirement. A sizeable number of our colleagues will write their last accounts or adjust their last claims over the next several years. By most accounts, we are nowhere near ready for this.