Insurance giant Legal & General has launched a data program for advisers to help provide a more tailored service to their protection clients.
The data program, called Customer Risk and Opportunity Management, is designed to allow advisers to analyse data in a clear, visual way and enable them to learn more about their customers to offer a more personalised service.
It will use software from visual analytics specialist Tableau, and will analyse trends and correlations relating to sale, retention, underwriting and claims experience.
As a result, Legal & General will be able to spot trends and patterns, identify opportunities and future risks, and make data-driven decisions.
The insurer can then create a 'dashboard' showing all the output to share with advisers to help them make better recommendations to their existing and future clients.
According to Rob Gaunt, head of commercial management and data quality management for Legal & General, this will help advises and clients in terms of "better quality of business".
It speaks volumes about the quality of business that our advisers submit, measured against our peer group. Simon BroadleySpeaking at the company's annual Business Quality Awards in London, Mr Gaunt said the issue is not how the amount of data, but how to use it most effectively.
"It's important to leverage all the data we have by developing a proper structure", he told attendees.
"Advisers have the opportunity to interact with the right customer at the right time, such as a life event like moving house or having a child. We want to support advisers with better [data-driven] insight.
"Also, there are risks [in not using data properly]", he said, such as "not knowing who their customers truly are, or losing them because we think of them as just a number."
The software program will be soft-launched in the second quarter of this year with some intermediary partners, with a wider roll-out in July.
The news came as Legal & General announced the winners of its 6th annual Business Quality Awards (BQAs), which recognise intermediaries who have demonstrated an exceptional standard of customer service and retention of protection business.
Among some of the winners were Wesleyan, which won the Outstanding Performance award.
Nigel Pullen, financial planning unit manager at Wesleyan, commented: "The award recognises our commitment to best practice and providing an excellent service to customers and consistently going ‘above and beyond’ what they expect, and we are extremely proud of the entire team for their dedication and hard work."
Best network in terms of customer excellence went to the Tenet Group; this is the second year in a row that the network won this award at the BQAs.
Simon Broadley, Tenet Group’s adviser propositions director, said: "This is an accolade we particularly value as it speaks volumes about the quality of business that our advisers submit, measured against our peer group, so we again thank our members for working in partnership with us to achieve such high standards.”
simoney.kyriakou@ft.com
