Make Change Happen: Getting Insurance Providers Ready To Better Serve Low-Income Households

In order to serve low-income and emerging consumers effectively, insurance providers need to make significant changes to the way they do business. Changes can include finding cost-effective ways to understand the needs of a new market segment, reaching clients through different distribution channels, managing expenses to accommodate for lower margins per policy, and building systems to tackle large volumes of transactions. Insurers may also need to make changes to how they recruit, train, incentivize and retain their staff, how they structure their organization, the technologies they use, and the partners they work with. Starting a change process for an insurer can be daunting, especially given the difficulties in making the business case to serve this market segment. Successful implementation of change requires that the process is managed carefully with a systematic approach.

This paper presents a process that can be used by insurers to initiate and manage the changes required to serve low-income households. The paper presents the experiences of six partners who have tested this change process.