TIME:TO - spotlight broker personal lines

Gina Willmer, Proposition Lead, Broker Personal Lines: We know that customers who come to brokers are often looking for something different. So, whether you're a standard customer looking for home, car, or van, all the way to the kind of more complex needs of high net worth customers or specialist niche needs such as campervan or thatch, it's really important for us to make sure that we're delivering products and propositions into the market that meet those customers’ needs. And that way we're helping brokers to attract customers, but also retain those customers as their needs change over time.

Kris Mcginley, Proposition and Product Specialist, Broker Personal Lines: We've got our digital capabilities show up in a lot of ways for brokers in the personal lines space. We like brokers to be able to trade with us digitally from end to end. We understand that that's not always going to be the case. There's going to be some intricacies when brokers are writing business or servicing customers through the lifecycle of the policy. Good service is where we can easily and quickly get customers and brokers back on track.

If brokers need support we've got our team of experts in Scotland who can help them. They can get in touch with the team via live chat through the Aviva Broker website. We've also got some virtual assistant technology there as well to answer some of the simpler queries. And we've got a phone line should the broker choose to get in touch that way.

Gina: In personal lines, we have a spread of distribution across partnerships and retail. All of our software houses now have insurer-hosted pricing rolled out, which means we can deliver our most sophisticated pricing into all of the software houses for our core products: home, motor and van.

Kris: You can access personal lines products and propositions through your software house, and you can place most of your business through that for your standard customer.

Gina: We've invested really heavily into Fast Trade over the last few years, particularly for our home products. If you're finding it hard to place a customer on your core software house, Fast Trade can show up in a number of different ways. Whether it's higher sums insured, business use, or holiday home, you can access the core Aviva product, but with a wider underwriting footprint, so that you can meet a wider range of customer needs.

So, one of the best bits about Aviva's proposition is our claims service.

Kris: We're here for your customers, when they need us. We pride ourselves on being there for them in their time of need and getting them back into the position that they need to be in as quickly as possible.

For motor, that's delivered mainly through our approved repairer network. We have Solus, our Aviva-owned repair centres, plus a wider, extensive network. So we've got that coverage for customers, that security, that wherever they are in the UK, they're going to be close to someone who can repair their car. And we've got a real pride in the speed of service that we give customers through our Solus repair centres.

Gina: We have people on the ground when there's been storms, when there's been floods. For brokers who are advising customers, it's really important at point of sale to make sure customers understand that our product is going to show up when it matters most.

Kris: Brokers can get in touch with us, and customers can get in touch with us in a number of ways. We've got a phone line for them to log claims and track claims. We've also got some digital technologies as well, so they can log those claims online, and they can track the progress of claims as we go. And we've recently partnered with Acturis to build an API which enables brokers get some real-time updates on their Acturis system, giving them efficiencies and savings where they don’t have to re-key information.

We’ve a number of tools available to help you support your customers. Whether that's risk management material that's available on our Aviva Broker website, which you can brand in your own way and send out to your customers, or whether it's webinars that we run throughout the year to give you a bit more information, a bit more industry specific.

Your feedback’s really important to us. That's what we need to make sure we've got propositions lined up in the right way for you and for your customers. Come to your account manager, come to our distribution team with any ideas that you have as to how we can work better together, and how we can get things better for your customers.