The Ontario Broker - Volume 22, Issue 3 - 19

TalentTALENT
WHAT'S NEW
TALENT VS. WORK: HOW A DIGITAL
WORKFORCE PROPS UP TALENT
Curtis Samoy, Founder, Clementine Tech
TALENT. A blanket term we use
in the business world to describe people
who work. But really the two couldn't
be more different, and in other worlds,
they're in fact often used oppositely.
Athletes, musicians and actors with a
surplus of talent are often thought of as
mutually exclusive from those putting
in real work. Today's talent shortage is
well known and lamented throughout
the broker channel, but if you ask
anyone directly they could never bring
themselves to say the space is short on
talent. Talented people abound, and
many teams are satisfied with the talent
they have. What they are truly lamenting
is how much WORK we're asking our
TALENT to do. Brokers in Ontario are
recognizing this and starting to deploy a
digital workforce to take on this extra load
and ease the urgency of hiring new talent.
There's been a big push for tech and
modernization in the insurance industry.
Need to reach a larger audience? Engage
your loyal customers? Upsell? Cross-sell?
There's a robust, standalone, third-party software tool for that,
and insurance brokers and companies alike are adopting them
in multiples. Suddenly you find yourself with more data in more
places. More steps added to more carrier processes. And it falls
on your talent to pick up all this extra work.
I believe the athletes and musicians are more on the right track.
Let the talent shine through in customer interactions or finding
real insights and efficiencies in your flashy new dashboards
and tools. Leave the work of data maintenance and following
meticulous processes to someone else. Or something else.
There's a new, intriguing option that doesn't aim to bring in
more work. Rather, it takes the work off the plate of your talent.
Digital workers churn tirelessly overnight and on weekends
making sure all the tedious hoops are jumped through and data
is populated/synchronized/transmitted across all your tools and
markets. Robotic Process Automation is not flashy, and digital
workers cannot replace talent. A digital worker will follow a set of
steps and rules without complaint and without faltering-erasing
backlogs, bottlenecks and low value tasks-while getting paid
accordingly. It's time to stop fighting over talent just so you can
get work done. It's time to repurpose your talent to be utilized
appropriately and spend less on what you need more of: workers.
Early adopting brokerages are finding value in offloading
repetitive, drawn-out tasks like Electronic Data Interchange
downloads (and the error handling, file renaming, and sorting
that comes with it), renewal reviews, and bookkeeping. There's
an eye on carrier uploads as well. Digital workers closely mimic
how a human operates a computer, allowing them to gather
data from any source, perform premium comparisons, recognize
errors on a screen and navigate around them, and interact with
The Ontario Broker - Volume 22, Issue 3

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Ontario Broker - Volume 22, Issue 3
