Paul Ricard: Hi, everyone, and welcome to Oliver Wyman's Reinventing Insurance podcast. I'm your host, Paul Ricard. [Intro Music] Today, I am welcoming Dr. Amy Lasater-Wille. Amy is the Director of Human Insights at Oliver Wyman, and together we're going to discuss some of her learnings working with insurers and their customers. Welcome, Amy.
Amy Lasater-Wille: Hi, thanks for having me.
Paul: So Amy, maybe for starters, can you briefly introduce yourself and share a little bit about your background?
Amy: I am the Director of Human Insights at Oliver Wyman, which I think is one of the greatest titles that anyone can possibly have. I came to Oliver Wyman by way of an anthropology PhD, and then a background in market research where I worked in pretty much every industry that there is, from media to chainsaw chains, to food and things like that.
Now at Oliver Wyman, I do a lot of work in financial services, which I absolutely love because it is an industry that is full of human insights. So, I essentially am the person that people come to whenever they are interested in bringing a little more of the human into their projects.
I get to work with a fantastic group of people and we work together to help people do everything, from get to understand their consumers a little better, to actually create entire new businesses, starting from the ground up with insights about what their consumers want and how they can help them better.
Paul: Great. So, let's dive right in. First off, I'm curious to get your view on what human insights actually are. So, can you tell us a bit more about that, and also why this is so important for our insurance friends to worry about this and to dig into it?
Amy: So, I come to human insights from anthropological perspective, and I would say anthropologists are all about taking things that seem ordinary or obvious in the world and trying to figure out what makes them so meaningful to people.
So, for instance, my anthropology PhD was about culinary schools and when people hear that, they think, "Oh, well, you must have just learned how to cook and that's it." But actually, the whole point was that when you have food or you're learning how to make food, it's all about how it is that people want to present themselves to the world. Like what it means to say that you have one kind of food that you're preparing versus another or what it means to prepare food in a certain way.
And all of the stuff that I do at Oliver Wyman is the same way. If you look at money, or going to an ATM versus talking to a person in a bank, or if you think about insurance, it's all – what is it that gives these decisions meaning to people?
When they're making these decisions, are they thinking about being a good person because they're saving money, or being a good person because they're providing for their children in the future?
It's never just a decision about some object. It's always beyond the obvious into these very deep emotional and social reasons for doing what they do.
Ideally, what happens in the human insights discipline is that you uncover things about the way that people are interacting with a product that ultimately make things better for everybody, because the client gets more business and then the consumers are able to get more of what they want out of the products and services that they use.
Paul: Can we talk through a few of your biggest “Aha!”s from working with insurers when it came to human insights through the years? And I'm particularly interested of course in what you found surprising, what your clients found surprising.
Amy: I'll start by saying that insurance is one of my favorite industries to work in because I think people –
Paul: That was not rehearsed, by the way –
Amy: No, and it truly is. What is really lovely about insurance is that there's so much bound up in it, at almost every level, that is super emotional.
So, if you're talking about a person buying insurance, obviously there's that whole aspect of providing for loved ones or feeling like you're doing something that's making you a good and responsible person for buying the insurance. If you're talking about a small business owner, it's sort of like the individual, but magnified, because the business often is part of their aspirations for themselves, and they have to provide for other people.
And so you get these very interesting moments where they say, "Okay, well, I got to this point where I've hired some people and now I have to do the right thing financially, and then also to provide for them," and there are all these wonderful calculations about what it means to be a good boss or a good provider.
So, you find these situations in which you've got benefits managers or HR representatives who are making decisions that are going to impact a lot of other people, and they're sort of stuck in the middle of all of these different forces.
Paul: You're not just talking to, let's say, the end consumer, right? You are also talking to eventually the people who are going to be the decision makers or are going to be key in the decision-making process. Let's say in that case, I'm assuming you're talking about something like commercial insurance or group benefits.
And so, understanding these people's needs and their particular situations and zeroing on this is critical to providing the best type of services and solutions. Is that what you're basically saying?
Amy: It's exactly right. One of my favorite examples was when we were doing a project for a mid-market insurance company. And so, they came to us and they said, "We really want to make sure that the claims process of what we're providing is differentiated. We want to make sure that it is a great claims process, and we think that that's going to help us get more business."
But the client that we had was pretty certain that the way that they were going to be able to differentiate themselves was by saying, "We have this sort of startup mentality where we have lots of good technology that's going to make the process faster." And we said, " Okay, let's find out if that resonates with people."
So, we put together some focus groups back when you could actually get people all in the same room. So, we had all these six or eight people in a room and we were talking to them about what they didn't like about the claims process, which was about what we had expected. And then we asked them what they would like, and it turned out that technology was not really a huge factor. It was actually that they wanted the human touch.
They wanted to feel like there was a human being on the other end of the process. And technology could make that happen, but that wasn't the focus for them. The focus was being able to have somebody who cared that they were talking to.
Paul: Oftentimes – technology, data analytics – is thought of as the answer. And from what you're saying, it's more this is the enabler, but you need to figure out what the answer is that technology or data is actually going to enable. So that's interesting.
And in particular, I'm also curious if you have anecdotes or insights on the individual and the end consumer side as well. Because the old saying is that insurance is sold and not bought, and if we exclude the regulatory mandated products, nobody wakes up thinking, "I'm going to buy insurance today."
Amy: Yeah, I think this is a huge issue. So, I will say that in – probably the last year and a half – I have talked to just hundreds of consumers about both insurance and I would say their financial lives in general, usually individual interview settings. And so, I've heard a lot of stories about why it is that people end up buying particular products and what's on their mind.
What I think is really interesting is that I would've thought that COVID would be something that would inspire people to do that. Like it would be that triggering instance. And that in the last year and a half that I've been talking to people, I don't actually hear that much about COVID being that kind of trigger.
And we've been running this longitudinal survey at Oliver Wyman about how people are reacting to COVID. And, when you look at how people are reacting in terms of insurance products, what you actually see is this pattern of a lot of people considering purchasing life insurance or changing their life insurance or changing their will.
And some people do it, but doing nothing, which is one of the options in the survey, is also a very popular option. Like, "I just did nothing." And so that sort of triggering moment turns out to be a really hard thing to predict or to create for people. So, I suspect actually that the way to get around this is to make sure that you're there when that happens.
Paul: It's not actually people never wake up and think about buying insurance. They do sometimes wake up and think about it, but they just don't act on it. And it's a matter of actually being there at the right place at the right time when they think about it, or when there is the right trigger to actually support them in the right way.
And so, more broadly, you were mentioning, obviously in the wake of COVID-19, and you mentioned all the work and the survey that has been going on that Oliver Wyman has been running around this.
What are some of the insights that you've gleaned there? How have human behaviors or human needs changed? Are there any things that you found particularly surprising or not surprising in the wake of the pandemic?
Amy: Yeah, so I think one of the things that surprised me at the beginning, and I say this as somebody who was living in New York when it hit, and of course everybody thought, "Oh my gosh, this is changing everything." The more things change, the more things stay the same or things sort of move back to being the same in some ways. So, some behaviors do seem like they're going back to normal.
The thing that I think is relevant for insurance, especially, is that we've recently – a group of colleagues that I've been working with – have been looking to see how much sort of a shift to digital purchasing behaviors has been, first of all occurring in different industries, but then how much it's been sticking.
And there is somewhere, as you can imagine, there's been a huge shift to digital and a huge shift to wanting to stay that way. But of all the industries that our colleagues are looking at, insurance is the one that seems the least sticky for the digital shift.
Paul: Any insights or perspectives on why that is?
Amy: I think it goes back to the same thing we were talking about, that there's so much of an emphasis on the need to feel like there's a person involved in insurance.
Paul: Personal relatable aspect is important. How do insurers come to you, and do they usually know that they need to look deeper into these human insights?
Amy: By the time someone gets to me, I think they already have some sense of the idea that they want human insights. I think there's often a desire to get to know people better.
What is often the case is the insurers that I talk to are not totally sure how they want to do it. Are you going to run a survey or are you going to do a focus group? Are you going to talk to people? Are you going to use the jobs to be done methodology? That we do with Taddy Hall.
The way that we do it just depends on the circumstance. So, do you need a large amount of quantitative data, in order to understand this? Do you want really deep nuanced interviews in order to uncover initial insights that will help you feed that? Often, we do a combination of both.
Paul: And do you see this more as a “Okay, we need to do this, we need to pursue this initiative, or we need to figure out how to crack how we design or sell this product.” Do you see this more as a one-off starting exercise, or is this more of a repeated exercise?
Amy: So, ideally what you would do if you were trying to create a new venture, or if you were trying to develop a value proposition, or even if you're just trying to look at how something that you're currently doing is working. So how are people receiving your claims process, or – this is a real example – how is it that we could partner with different companies to get the word out about our product? At each of those phases, you can bring in research with consumers to get a much better sense of what's going on.
I would say ideally what would happen is that an insurer would, if they have a thorny problem, like how is it that we can best differentiate ourselves, or we have a new business, what is our value proposition, you would want to start out with really deep customer insights. And by customer, I mean the end consumer and then also if there are relevant intermediaries along the process, you would interview them.
So, you get a really deep sense of what they all need. And then you dip in from time-to-time to make sure that you're delivering on that. And it becomes even more important if what you're doing is you're building something from scratch, and so then what you want to do is iterate and test and learn.
Paul: And digging into this, because I can see a risk or a big challenge where you almost always go back to the well on a regular basis and you almost get stuck into research paralysis.
What I'm hearing you saying is, there's an element of putting something out there, seeing if it sticks and iterating from there, like prototyping, whatever you're doing into existence, rather than continuing to expand and refine and iterate on your research.
Amy: Yeah, there's a happy medium where you say, "Okay, I've learned what I need to know for now. I'm going to put something out there and then see how it goes." And just don't worry that it's not the exact final version. You can always come back and change.
Paul: And that's something that we discussed with Michael Keeney, where there's an element of when you talk about de-risking a venture or that could apply to an initiative as well, part of it involves figuring out what risks or what type of risks you're willing to take and to what extent.
It's been great hearing about your journey. I'm curious if you have any final thoughts or words of wisdom for our audience before we wrap.
Amy: If I had to leave words of wisdom for anybody – I think anybody, I would say this too – is that just because you are a person doesn't mean that you know all people.
The thing that I find endlessly fascinating about this job and the thing that keeps me doing hundreds of interviews is that every one of them is different and tells you something new and fascinating about the human experience.
As the world changes, people change too. Those sorts of underlying needs find different ways of bubbling up. And to give them something that they can really use and that will make their lives better.
Paul: Great. Well, terrific. Thank you so much, Amy, for your time. That was absolutely fascinating.
That was Dr. Amy Lasater- Wille, who's the Director of Human Insights at Oliver Wyman. [Outro Music] For more information about our Reinventing Insurance series, you can find everything on our website at www.oliverwyman.com/reinventinginsurance. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time.
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
