Unlocking Frictionless Customer Experience with Recommendation Engines

Unlocking Frictionless Customer Experience with Recommendation Engines

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In this last episode of the InsurBreak Podcast, discover major key takeaways from Tiffany Grinstead, VP of Personal Lines Marketing at Nationwide! 

  • Challenges Addressed: Customer acquisition and retention tackled with AI and digital tools.
  • Nationwide’s Marketing Magic: Data-driven segmentation for tailored messages to the right audience.
  • Innovation Insights: Telematics programs, smart home offerings, and the leap into independent agent models.
  • Consumer-Agent Dynamics: Unveiling surprising gaps in insurance literacy amid economic uncertainties.
  • AI’s Transformative Role: Cautionary exploration of legal aspects and the power of recommendation engines.
  • Tech for Risk Mitigation: Connected cars, Smart Home programs, and strategic partnerships in action.
  • Diversity and Inclusion Spotlight: Personal stories and Nationwide’s commitment to embracing diversity.

Recommendation engines are definitely the future. And, you know, we’re doing work in this space, using technology to automate and connect data to just personalize the experience. You’re tuning in to the InsurBreak podcast. It’s the podcast about the latest and greatest trends in insurance. I’m your host Ash, and I invite you to join us as we interview experts and executives at Insurance, covering innovative practices, technology advancements, and insight into the future of insurance.

Ash: This podcast is sponsored by Zelros. Zelros is an AI software solution for insurance to hyper personalize the customer buying experience with insurance recommendations across all channels, boosting client acquisitions, cross-sell and up-sell. 

In this episode, we sit down with Tiffany Grinstead, VP of personal lines marketing at Nationwide. It is a longer episode today because there was so much to cover in this conversation, so make sure to stick around until the end to hear about what challenges insurance companies are facing, such as acquiring and retaining customers, how AI and other digital tools are being used to help tackle these challenges, and the newest Insurtech developments that Tiffany is following. 

Ash: We are joined today by Tiffany Grinstead, VP of personal lines marketing at Nationwide. Thank you for being with us today, Tiffany. 

Tiffany: Oh, thank you so much for having me. 

Ash: So, to start out, can you maybe give us a little bit of insight into your background in the insurance field? 

Tiffany: Absolutely. I am lucky enough to be part of Nationwide, and I have worked pretty broadly across the insurance and financial services industry. So I have worked across life insurance, annuities, mutual funds, and commercial and personal lines insurance on the property casualty side as well. 

Ash: And what are your current responsibilities at Nationwide? 

Tiffany: My current role, I lead all of our marketing for our personal lines business. So that is marketing for auto, home, umbrella, power sports, motorcycle, RV, identity theft, and that’s sold through all of our channels. So partners, independent agencies, and direct to consumer. And Nationwide has more than $9 billion in personalized business annually. It’s a big business and it’s a great business to be in because really, if you ask me what business I’m in, I would tell you it’s to protect people with extraordinary care. 

Ash: So there’s two parts of the conversation, obviously, the marketing and the technology. How do you approach marketing insurance products to different audiences? 

Tiffany: We focus on three main groups in our personalized business here at Nationwide. So that’s going to be our current members, prospective consumers, and in the B2B space, insurance agencies and partners. And our approach is to use segmentation powered by data to get the right message to the right audience at the right time. And that can be different cohorts of folks in the partner space, especially on the B2B side, based on their goals, their market size, their relationship with us, their geographic footprint, their behavior, their business model. And with members, we look at their behavior, their geography, what products they have, what products they’re interested in. And with prospective consumers, we’ll look at things like their geography, their behavior, their interests, and we find the most effective way to engage across all of these audiences is when we can trigger marketing touch points based on behavior, interest coming out of data.

So, for example, if we know in the member space if someone’s having a service issue, we can get the right information in front of them at the right moment. If we can find shoppers in our prospects or we can understand in a given B2B partner, let’s say an insurance agency, which person within that agency is interested at this moment in telematics and make sure we give that message to that person within the agency at the moment when they need it. That’s really been a wonderful approach for us, kind of leaning into data and personalization as the fundamental building blocks of our marketing programs. 

Ash: What would you say is more difficult, just out of curiosity, is it getting the prospective customers? I guess what’s the higher rate, the prospective customers or retaining the customers for an additional add on or a different type of insurance? 

Tiffany: I mean, it’s always better. I think we all know as marketers right, to retain and deepen your relationships with the households you have just because that’s always going to be a way to, at lower cost profitably, expand your base. But we also know that growth is important and so bringing on consumers at the right time is also a key part of our strategy. 

Ash: I was just curious. For me, it’s like digital has been around so long that I couldn’t imagine industry or insurance without digital. So did you work in insurance when there was like when digital marketing was not around?

Tiffany: I mean, I think insurance has actually been quite sophisticated in digital marketing and you see a broad use of digital tools across the board. When I started, when we were talking about digital, we were talking about, wow, we have a website. And then in the early 2000s, we were talking about we’re on Facebook and we’re still having conversations like, are you on TikTok? But they’ve evolved to what is your influencer strategy and how are you using creators across these different things? How are you using digital tools to engage?

At Nationwide, we are pretty sophisticated in how we think about digital. We map our customer journeys across the actions that we know customers want to take with us, from sort of research all the way through the sales funnel, all the way through their service experience. And that’s both B2B and B2C. And we look at where our digital touch points helping move folks through sort of what they want to be doing with us. Right. So what their journey is. So that can be basic things these days, like search engine optimization and paid search to integrated social media or triggered emails or targeted digital ads. Really all kind of laying across this idea of what do you need in this moment to get you where you want and need to be next in order to have sort of a frictionless experience with Nationwide? And that goes all the way through to quoting capabilities, private label quoting capabilities for agencies. And we’re very proud of a new digital tool that we are making available to our agencies to help them assess the digital acumen of their own agency, how they run their business, how they market. What does their digital acumen look like compared to other agencies like them, so that they can make better decisions about their digital success? Largely because as a carrier, we have invested so much in that over the years. So we have a lot that we can help agencies with in that space. 

Ash: So maybe if you could summarize I know we talked about customer acquisition and retention, but maybe you could just summarize one, two, three challenges for each acquisition and retention, and then how do you best address those challenges?

Tiffany: Yeah, I think the biggest thing is that customers are really saturated with messaging, and I think the advent of AI is going to create even more inundation. Right. So the real challenge is relevancy. Right? And how do we get relevant, stay relevant, show up in relevant moments. And that really comes from understanding data. So what we would call zero party data, which is the data customers give you and say, yes, please do something with this, or first party data, which is the data you already own, in the course of doing business. We’ve been relying, I think, as marketers just in the world on third party data a lot. And we know that there are a lot of things changing in terms of customer privacy and all of those things. So really just making sure from a challenge perspective that you’re gathering data correctly so that you can use data correctly so that you can be relevant. That, to me, is a really big deal. And I think insurance companies are in an arms race to get increasingly better at how we lever data to build relevant touch points. And that’s for loyalty with the folks who are already with you. That’s to bring new folks in. We’ve definitely been working to integrate our salesforce systems into our data set to allow us to market to a contact and align their appropriate sales follow up at the most efficient and effective moment.

So that would be kind of one area, I think, in terms of retention. And this is an insurance industry venue, so I think I won’t be telling anybody anything they don’t know. When we say that we are in a unique and unprecedented market environment, it’s a very hardening market. Inflation, labor shortage, we’re seeing impacts on the cost of fulfilled claims. Accident severity and frequency are up, and its unprecedented weather patterns in these last few years. So the entire insurance industry is reacting to those events and we’re trying to help agents and customers understand the environment, understand its impact, and how to navigate it. And as a result, I think thought leadership, content marketing and B2B2C, to arm agencies to have the right conversations has become even more important in the insurance agency during sort of these market conditions. 

Ash: Just curious when you say that, obviously staying relevant, what would you say is maybe the top two or three tools that you use to stay relevant? Would you say it’s like YouTube ads? Is it TikTok ads? Just curious to see where you guys are spending the most, maybe in your budget. 

Tiffany: I think relevancy is a little bit less about the media that you’re using and more about the message and the moment. Right. So it’s about understanding where someone is in their buy cycle with you again back to that customer journey and being able to serve up exactly the right message at exactly the right time. And maybe that is a banner ad on ESPN.com, because I’ve been looking at insurance this morning and it’s tailored to me as a sports fan. Just a random example, right? Or maybe that is in the B2C space, kind of more focused on I am in this certain state and in this state, this is the reality of our insurance situation. And I’ve been doing a certain kind of quoting and what is the right message that can pop up in my email box or on my LinkedIn or potentially on TikTok, right. That’s going to serve me in that moment and not every medium that we have available to us as marketers is yet able to be tied into that data universe. Right, so you’re doing this base marketing where you’re trying to make sure you’re just getting the most aligned messages through the right sort of mediums and then you’re layering on top of that the hyper targeted, hyper relevant messaging. And the more targeted and relevant your messaging is, the less it matters how, as long as it’s kind of coming across at the moment that they need it. Right? 

Ash: Yeah, it makes sense. And by the way, is there such thing as like too personalized?

Tiffany: I know that that is true. I mean, we’ve all sort of experienced that. I don’t necessarily see the insurance agency just in the environment that we operate in, sort of operating on that far edge. Right. So most, at least of what we do is in spaces that are sort of less out on that edge, at least from what I’ve seen of what we do here.

Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. How do you make sure that you’re innovating but also that laws are changing fast, so how do you make sure you’re ahead of that? I think the most important thing is that you’re really listening. Right. At heart, innovation is about understanding what people need and finding ways to meet their needs that are exciting and engaging, right? So the greatest innovations aren’t necessarily because someone came and said I would like an iPhone, it’s because Apple listened to all the things that people wanted to do and they came with the iPhone as the great solution to the things that I want to do. Right. Obviously, we’re in a highly regulated industry. I mean, we’re very excited by ongoing regulatory modernization efforts and the greater understanding that ensure provided value-added products and services can be good for both the carrier and the customer. So we’re used to operating in a highly regulated environment and we work alongside our regulators. So just to kind of answer that question. And there is a lot of innovation going on in the insurance industry, I’ll give you a couple of examples of places where we’re really playing. What I would call sort of data driven driving, right? The future is going to be insurance companies leaning increasingly on data provided through devices, apps, partnerships with providers like OEMs, capturing personalized risk behavior to more accurately price policies based on an individual’s risk, right? So we see carriers all have telematics programs, we have telematics programs. We’re very proud of our smart ride for safe driving and smart miles for low mileage drivers.

We’re the first insurer actually to launch a discount on a homeowner’s policy for driving behavior. So we have a new telematics home discount program that launched in Utah and we’ll roll out to ten more states in 2023 and that lets consumers save an average of 5% on their home insurance if they’re one of our safest drivers. And that’s exciting because there’s just a lot I think that telematics can do not only to help kind of a consumer save on their insurance policy, but also to make people safer so that we can have less accident severity and frequency and that means more people who get to live to see tomorrow. We’re really excited in that space that we’re going to be launching a new program to reduce distracted driving in the future and that’s coming soon, so stay tuned on that. Another area where I think there’s a lot of innovation and insurance is proactive risk mitigation. So you’re seeing the ability to leverage the power of connected home data so that you can mitigate loss and just be more competitive and personalized in the rates that we can offer. So Nationwide is continuing to evolve our smart home offering through new partnerships, pilots in new markets. We’re really focused on water, fire and security. We recently extended a partnership with Notion, which is a multi sensor device partner, launched a partnership with Ting for electrical fire sensors and we have a pilot with Finn and their water shut off device as our newest. And we’re always kind of looking to bring new partners in because when you think about the future, this sort of portfolio of ways that I can reduce loss in my home, makes my home safer.

At sort of best. It saves me from inconvenience and money loss. And even more importantly, it can save lives. Right. When we rolled out Ting, which you plug into the wall and it tells you if there’s a chance of an electrical fire in your home, we had homeowners call us and tell us, oh my gosh, my house could have burned down if I didn’t have this device. So we know that these innovations are great because they’re good for the world. When they’re good for the world, the regulators come with you. 

Ash: Yeah, that makes sense. Two follow up things. One is a comment, which is you’re hearing that people want to save money and to live safer. So it sounds like you’re offering solutions. They’re innovating for that. And then the second thing is, obviously it sounds like you’re wanting to gather a lot more data, obviously to be able to offer discounts on insurance. In terms of the legal side, do you foresee that being an issue, that maybe that’s too much data you’re gathering or not necessarily. What’s your take on that?

Tiffany: Well, as these products exist today, people select them, so they’re selecting that value exchange telematics or smart home. I think we’re going to stay very close to the legal and regulatory environment, as is the whole industry, because we’re absolutely committed to doing the right thing for people to help them protect what matters most.

Ash:  In the future, do you see that getting more strict or not necessarily?

Tiffany: In the current environment, I’m not sure that I can necessarily predict. I think people get a lot of value out of personalization and there’s actually a lot of data that salesforce put out sort of saying that people are willing to give up a certain amount of privacy in order to get a certain amount of value when they see the value creation. And I think when you’re talking about things like saving money and living safer, I think people are seeing that as a good value proposition. 

Ash: Yeah, I agree. And it’s similar to the apps on our phones, like food apps or whatever apps are available. It’s like, can we use your location to determine or like even advertising ID, people are willing to give that out if they’re getting personalized recommendations for just so why not insurance to save money and live better. That makes sense. 

Tiffany: And it’s something that we’re all thinking about, right? How do you get more of that zero party data that people willingly give you because they want the value exchange. And for us, a lot of this telematics is zero party data because they’re agreeing to give this to us in exchange for discounts that they believe they’re driving will earn. 

Ash: The next topic is obviously Nationwide transited from captive agent model to an independent agent model. How did that model impact your marketing distribution and the work and the tools that you use to support them? 

Tiffany: Well, one thing that I would say that might not be sort of widely known in the marketplace, but we have been a very strong independent agency carrier for many, many years. We had the Allied and Harleysville brands which are independent carrier brands and they became a part of Nationwide. So by the time we made the choice to transition from exclusive to independent we already had a substantial number of independent agencies that worked with us. So over the last couple of years we’ve transitioned our legacy agencies to the independent channel. And the one thing I would say is that’s created a need for more B2B marketing and we continue to do our direct to consumer and our member marketing. But as we’ve kind of moved from captives to a mix of captives and independents to all independence and various kind of innovative partners, we’ve had to really hone our B2B marketing capabilities. Now, as an enterprise, we’re very lucky. Our financial services company has always been B, two B and has worked closely selling the majority of our products in financial services through financial advisors and independent agencies. And that’s the part of the business that I actually spent the majority of my career. So it was an easy transition to come over to this side of the business and bring some of that expertise as we kind of double click on that B2B marketing. I also think we recognize the importance of data as more important than ever. So we’ve been able to build highly integrated personalization across our sales, marketing and product teams again to allow us to get the right message to the right people within an agency at the right time. So that’s things like targeting telematics messaging based on agency usage data and allowing agents to interact with those messages and then sales to follow up very quickly through salesforce in order to have a conversation about that area of interest. So a lot of really good sort of martech work that has allowed us to be really successful in B2B.

Ash: Seems like the independent model is a lot better than the captive model?

Tiffany: Well, they’re just two different models and for us the independent model is absolutely the right model. 

Ash: So obviously we’ll talk a little bit about the current market conditions, the economic crisis, what are the current challenges and shifts in priorities in marketing and sales agents maybe? How has your thinking changed? 

Tiffany: Well, it’s interesting. We do a survey called Agency Forward which is part of our program to help agents sort of look forward into the future. And we recently did a survey and even though inflation is in the news, most consumers expect a minor fender bender will probably cost about $2,000 to repair and take two weeks, when the reality is it’s four, maybe $5,000 and takes six to eight weeks. So the consumer perception is lagging some of what we know to be true. And that’s something that all insurers are going to need to address with education as we talk about why rates are where they are and why insurance works the way it does. So that’s something that we have to help our agent partners with because they’re having a lot of very hard conversations right now. And that’s an important part of our marketing strategy, targeting our agents with the right messages that they can use to sit down and have these conversations that are happening with their customers. Also then having the right marketing program for our current members and even prospective customers in the right moments. We’ve also heard that in this time, when there’s so much shifting, the economic situation is what it is, that people don’t necessarily understand their coverage. And it’s a good conversation to be able to have, to be able to say, well, you pay this because your whole roof is covered. Not just part of your roof, right? Or you pay this because you have this deductible. You pay this because you have additional coverages that are really important for you. And so we’ve recently created a series of fast, quick coverage videos in partnership with our agencies. A lot of our independent agencies asked us to do this work and gave us a lot of feedback through the process. And it’s all about explaining coverages to current members, to prospective members. And we’re seeing agents use these for retention. We’re seeing them attach them alongside a quote. They’re using them in a lot of different channels and they’re performing really well for us. The efforts to help retain our current members have always been a high priority, but it may be taken on a higher priority. I would also say marketing efforts to help members self service have become really important to understand and learn new ways to service their insurance. Most people don’t want to get on the phone, but they may not know that they can do many of the tasks that they’ve largely had to do in the past over the phone, online. Now, we have a really robust set of digital self service offerings, be that web, mobile app, even. We have chat bots and all of those kinds of things that allow somebody to do what they need to do without necessarily having to reach someone and sit there and explain what they want to do. And consumers love self service when you can make them aware of it. And it’s the same thing in the claims process, right? Consumers are used to tracking a pizza. They want to be able to track a claim. And so we understand that and we’ve invested a lot to make that a reality. And so I think those are areas where making sure consumers can learn a new way to file a claim and learn a new way to add or replace the vehicle, learn a new way to access their proof of insurance that’s more digital, more on demand. Probably going to satisfy them more based on the data we have. That’s, I think, a huge push for us. 

Ash: So you’ve probably heard of the global Consumer Study. Yes. So one of our recent guests was Marissa Patriano. She works at Remark. And we were talking about the Global Consumer Study and insurance literacy. And people who think they have a high insurance literacy actually don’t have a high insurance literacy. And then people who are not as confident actually do know a lot about insurance. So it’s really interesting to see that. But, do you see a shift in how consumers and agents are engaging together?

Tiffany: It is interesting. We had a group of insurance agents together not very long ago, just talking actually about this very topic. How are they working with their clients in this sort of  time of economic uncertainty and what kinds of conversations are they having? And what we’re hearing and we’re seeing is that there are a lot of folks who, they still want to talk to someone about their insurance needs. You get out of like, very basic monoline auto, and people are recognizing that their level of literacy might not be where they would need it to be to be able to make some of the choices that they need to make. So whether that’s an independent agent in their community or an insurance professional, they’re reaching over the phone. This is especially true of homeowners insurance. And so we’ll even see that people will start some of these journeys online. But often before they bind, they want to talk to someone. And that’s something that we see holding up. And it is really interesting because I think we all want to be able to offer our products as efficiently as possible. But when you look at insurance literacy and you look at the fact that for many people, their home is the most expensive and largest investment asset that they have, they want to get somebody’s validation that they’re protecting it in the right way. Our next big topic is technology. Outside of the obvious roles that AI plays in insurance, what role do you see AI generative AI play in insurance that maybe aren’t obvious or people haven’t heard of?

Tiffany:  It’s funny. My personal trainer loves Chat GPT so much, so every morning he’s like pulling it up when we’re working out. And he’s like, I’m going to tell it to show me a duck in a snowball fight. Then up pops a picture of a duck in a snowball fight. Right? So right now, I think everyone is playing with AI, right? It’s sort of an adventure land. What does it do? How does it work? And there’s no doubt that AI is going to make insurers more efficient in serving client needs. But I think in many ways, it’s too soon to predict what that’s going to look like. I think the regulators are going to weigh in. I think the legislators are going to weigh in. I think we’re all trying to work together to fully understand the implications. What I will maybe speculate a little bit more on is I think AI is going to transform the way marketers work. Whether that’s going to be content creation, data modeling, targeting, segmenting. It’s going to be able to create ultra personalized, data driven experiences that are going to self optimize over time. And that’s going to mean that marketers are going to have to be a lot more agile. But I also think that we’re going to continue to need marketers to be the guardrails for the brand as these technologies come into play. In terms of insurance, I think we’re going to see AI impact underwriting. It’s going to impact telematics, smart devices, claims, processes. But that’s going to play out as folks start to work through those legal and regulatory implications. And I think right now what we’re seeing is technology that’s coming out so fast that we’re still working through some of those other implications. So there’s sort of this pure idea of what can the technology do and then there’s in the environments that we operate in, what are we going to allow the technology to do? 

Ash: Yeah, what about the use of recommendation engines, maybe? What are some applications you’ve seen that aren’t ubiquitous?

Tiffany: Recommendation engines are definitely the future. And we’re doing work in this space using technology to automate and connect data, to just personalize the experience as customers and agents move through their journeys. There’s a lot of vendors in this space. We find we need to look at them with an expertise lens to maximize our use cases and remain efficient. There’s so many different organizations that are bringing different strengths to the table. Right? So you look to say, okay, who has expertise in the use cases that we are more likely to lean into? But I do think this is already here. Almost every insurer is using some form of a recommendation engine at some level within their marketing programs. And certainly we have that as well, especially in our direct space. 

Ash: We talked about the recommendation engines as an application of AI. What about understanding the customer’s risk exposure? Doesn’t seem like it’s that complicated. Like, if I live in Florida, my risk exposure for natural disaster is probably a little bit higher. But I guess what are some of the other ways you’re using technology to better understand the customers risk exposure?

Tiffany: We use a number of different technology partners to find and decipher our data and to drive quality leads into our direct program operations to target cros-ssell among our current need members. And we’re able to find shoppers in key life moments. So there’s clearly a lot of data out there, a lot of media partners offer a lot of targeting capabilities. And so you just align to what makes the most sense for the goal that you have. And it’s important you’re looking at things like what kinds of products attract what kinds of folks, and as you said, their risk exposure kind of plays into some of that. Right? 

Ash: I wonder if there’s, I was thinking about like, for example, I have the 24 Go app for 24 Hours Fitness, or if there’s a fitness app that’s like, hey, this person is working out more, maybe their life insurance? Maybe there’s ways you can integrate a lot of these types of lifestyle things that are like already being tracked or like the Apple Watch. As you’re walking more, you have more, you get more steps in, so maybe your insurance goes down.

Tiffany:  A super great example is connected car. So if you have a car that has connected car and that data is being about your driving is already being sort of captured by that connected car, whether that’s whatever make model of that car company that you’re sort of working with there, you already can choose. If you want to go into our telematics program, let’s say our Smart Ride program, you can choose to say, yes, I want you to tap into my connected car and we can offer you the telematics discounts instantly. Whereas someone else would need to have a couple of months of driving data before they land on what their discount is going to be. So that’s a great example of kind of what you’re talking about. 

Ash: Yeah. Cool. And then just to close off the topics. Are there any exciting new Insurtech developments or trends that you’re currently following or something that you kind of want to tell us about that maybe the world hasn’t heard about yet, in terms of Insurtech? 

Tiffany: We’re always looking at technology to identify a potential loss and prevent it before it happens. So a lot of the things that I talked about earlier, our Smart Home program, anything where we can help work with our members to help them be safer, that’s definitely an area that we’re really interested in. I know in the workers compensation space on the commercial line side, we have a partnership with Kinetic that’s created wearable devices to give the wear instant feedback when they’re bending or lifting something in a way that could cause injury. So that’s a great example of a partnership that we have. We also recently announced a partnership with Comp Science, which uses AI to analyze workplace videos to identify potential hazards. So we’re always on the lookout for partners that we think can help our members stay safer because it really is at the end of day for us, and I say it over and over again because it’s true. It’s protection with extraordinary care. That’s what on your side means. And that’s really when we look at Insurtech developments and trends, that’s the lens through which we’re using. 

Ash: We always ask each speaker about diversity, equity and inclusion and belonging. DEIB, what are your thoughts on DEIB and insurance and tech? And do you have a personal story to share for our audience? 

Tiffany: I’m really excited that you asked this question. Nationwide is definitely a leader in this space and I’m incredibly grateful to get to work for a company that takes this so seriously. So we have Associate Resource Groups, for example, across a vast number of areas and I’m a member of the Women’s Resource Group, and as the proud mom of an LGBTQ person, I’m in the Pride Resource Group, but I am the executive sponsor for what we call our Diverse Abilities Associate Resource Group. And I’m really proud of the work we do in this resource group. And it’s really about harnessing the superpowers that folks with disabilities can bring to the workforce, making sure that we’re creating products that can serve folks with disabilities across the country. And one of the things that we’ve been focused on within Diverse Abilities is expanding our definition to include both visible and invisible disabilities, including neurodiversity. And I’m a big proponent of the ways that neurodiverse people bring huge benefits to organizations. And a great example, I have Tourette syndrome. And there is a ton of research that talks about the fact that people with Tourette Syndrome have some pretty cool positives, and one of those is Hyper Focus. And so, knowing that, yes, you might see my fingers or my face contort now and then, but the upside of that is that I’m going to be able to bring a level of hyper focus to the work that I do that benefits the company. That’s exciting to be part of a company that really recognizes all of the different ways that we bring ourselves to work and can recognize our strengths from that. It’s really a wonderful thing.

Ash: That’s a really cool personal story. And I think that sometimes companies might need that. So that therefore, with every disability there comes a strength that other people don’t have. That’s really cool. 

Tiffany: Yeah, and I mean, I think the beauty of truly embracing diversity and inclusion is this idea that there really isn’t a normal right. We all get to bring this unique set of strengths to who we are and we can celebrate that in our associates and we can celebrate that in our customers. And I think insurance is in a really cool position as an industry around that because everyone needs insurance. 

Ash: Exactly. 

Tiffany: And that means all people, right? All people. And that’s something that I think we can really lead with as an industry. 

Ash: If you could go back 20 years, what advice would you tell your younger self? 

Tiffany: I think that I would tell myself to just slow down and enjoy the process of learning and growing. You feel so much anxiety. And I think there’s a lot of data that says that we’re more anxious as people than we ever were post pandemic. Right. So you have a lot of folks coming out of school who are very anxious. I remember in the early years of my career having a lot of that anxiety. And so I would say, like, it’s okay to take a deep breath. It’s okay to be in the learning and growing stage of your career. In fact, it’s important to kind of enjoy that and just soak up as much as you can, keeping in mind that people will see the learning and growing that you’re doing, and you’ll be rewarded for that. 

Ash: This podcast is sponsored by Zelros. Zelros is an AI software solution for insurers to hyper-personalize the customer buying experience with insurance recommendations across all channels, boosting client acquisitions, cross-sell and up-sell. Thank you for tuning in to the Insurebreak podcast. Join us next month as we interview another insurance executive to gain insight on innovative practices, technology advancements and what the future of the industry looks like. See you next month. 

Navigating Customer Engagement and AI Transformation