Author: System

With Makayla Everett, SimplyBiz

As a continuation of Uinsure’s ‘How the pro’s do it’ campaign, Makayla Everitt, Head of SimplyBiz Mortgages discusses the insurance opportunity that lies within the Buy-to-Let market with her top 10 tips… Don’t forget the tenant!

Tenants could hold the key

With many struggling to get a foot on the property ladder, the demand for rental properties has soared over recent years.

The stigma around owning your own home has changed as more people see long-term rental solutions more financially viable than getting a place of their own. Bearing this in mind, tenants are no different to homeowners in the respect that should something happen to their home, their most cherished possessions are covered. Not only that, but should the property become uninhabitable to any reasons, tenant insurance would find them a place to stay whilst the repairs are made.

Commonly, many tenants believe it is the landlord’s responsibility to arrange contents insurance, where of course, it isn’t. There is also a real risk that many tenants maybe unaware and in breach of tenancy agreements of their contract stipulates contents insurance is required.

Raising awareness in their area is essential. By partnering with local letting agents, you would be able to promote this issue whilst also opening to a new, under-serviced area of the market, with potential to re-engage with these clients further down the line if they do require potential mortgage and protection advice.

You can make a real difference

1. Don’t forget tenants want to protect their income and families too. Offer them a review to ensure they are kept secure.
2. Don’t forget that Landlords also need protection and there are a number of landlord focused products available to support across a number of areas.
3. Don’t have the time? Referring Landlord Insurances, LPS and Rent Guarantee offers security and will open the door to new future clients.
4. Win, win – offer an enhanced letting agreement for better protected tenants.
5. You can support your landlords in getting back to auctions and undertaking refurbishment with Bridge-to-Let products.
6. Clients of tomorrow – don’t underestimate the value of Contents Only policies.
7. Create loyalty with existing landlords, use the agent’s knowledge to guide where they buy. This will create an instant let, the landlord is then happy to give the agent yet another property.
8. Tenants giving notice are potentially your purchasers of today. Referrals from the letting agent can benefit all concerned.
9. Free marketing literature to support referral business is available from most insurance providers.
10. Increase your brand awareness, board presence and overall business growth by developing string relationships with agents in your area.

Let’s not forget landlords

With rental property demand the highest it has been in decades, and more clients entering the Buy-to-Let space- have you considered targeting portfolio and landlord clients in your area?

Following the turbulent year that was 2020, the mantra ‘expect the unexpected’ never rang truer. Landlords and letting agents place great value on loyal and dependable tenants who provide regular income. Landlord insurance is a viable solution to all landlords ensuring that if the property is damaged, uninhabitable or lays vacant for an extended period that the property is repaired, and the landlord is not left out of pocket.

You can offer to work in association with your local letting agents in a mutually beneficent manner, you work can provide them, and you, with an income, it can safeguard the owner of the property against having to find another tenant, thus running the risk of a loss of income and, perhaps most importantly, it will also provide safety and security for the renting party. Quite literally, and like every fairground across the UK, everyone’s a winner.

So, hopefully you are now thinking which letting agents you have in your area, and who will benefit from your experience, knowledge, and professionalism. Please remember a lot of these business leads can be referred, ensuring you receive maximum income for minimum time spent.

Simple products and services stand out. It has become a necessity worth striving to achieve in a complex market and within busy mortgage firms across the UK.

Creating Simplicity

So how do you go about achieving simplicity in your business? Simplicity is all about finding the right balance of what is necessary and what is not.

In the past, many advisers preferred to structure their sales process across several face-to-face client appointments. The pandemic forced a move to online meetings, which resulted in much improved efficiencies for both advisers and customers alike with many firms choosing to continue this approach post lockdown. This even led to wider benefits such as being able to return mortgage recommendations within a few hours of the call because of the time savings generated.

This is a great illustration of how simplicity has been created on such a wide scale, despite it being forced on us by a global pandemic. And, importantly, it makes the advisory community stand out.

Hiding complexity to create simplicity

Once you cut through everything in your business that isn’t necessary, the next stage is to look at what is necessary but repetitive.

This is where good technology solutions come into play, effectively hiding the complexity of most repetitive actions (that’s what it’s really good at), so the users only see simplicity.

As an example, Uinsure knew that asking lots of questions to apply for insurance was complex, boring, arduous and sometimes ambiguous. So instead, we decided to shed all the complexity of traditional providers, by only asking the critical questions and sourced the rest of the data from other places. This was a meaningful innovation because it simplified the experience of accessing insurance and hid the complexity to the end user.

In a world full of complexity, it is simplicity that makes a product or a service stand out. It’s therefore crucial that we understand how to balance complexity with simplicity and can implement this understanding in our businesses.

The reality of today’s landscape is your customer is overwhelmed with choice. Brand loyalty is lower than ever and switching to competitors is getting easier and easier – Facebook recently learned this the hard way after it showed negative user growth for the first time ever and lost $250bn dollars of value in the process.

Customer experience (CX) is the most important thing any organisation needs to be obsessing about to compete, grow and even survive. Everything from systems and communications to processes and proposition needs to be created with CX technology at the very heart of the business.

For most of us, we can’t build an entire ecosystem ourselves so choosing the right partners who can integrate seamlessly enabling the CX you want to create for your business is mission critical.

When assessing the market for partners you’ll find two kinds of businesses, on the one hand are those that are largely product siloed and use technology to automate traditional processes. These firms will essentially take the same arduous paper processes customers used to fulfil and digitise them without any thought as to how they will intertwine into the CX you’re developing to accelerate your business.

This is then often supported by sub-standard API integrations making your CX slow, fragmented and clunky – a recipe to send your clients elsewhere.

On the other hand are the true technology companies that have learned the above approach isn’t good enough, nor the way forward, because CX is not being seen as the most important single element of your development. It’s these firms that are focused on coding new solutions and have been able to understand how to embed a culture of customer centricity using technology and data that are outperforming their peers.

So when you’re looking for potential partners, it’s vital to assess if organisations you could partner with for technology, culturally embrace customer centricity principles and place CX at the heart – or is it simply used as a tag line? Culture is the key.

Those that do embed CX culture are the businesses that are led by the engine room, not from the boardroom. It’s the individuals that are on the front-line within an organisation that are experiencing the live customer feedback and are working daily to solve problems, who will not only know where to focus the business but will also often come up with the best solutions and are empowered to make decisions.

The Leadership Team should be there to orchestrate the direction, reward bold thinking and be responsible for setting the boundaries – that is how true customer centricity is achieved.

When firms are choosing their business partners of the future it’s vital to assess who has built customer centricity and not just technology, and who is driven by a talented and trusted empowered team, as they will be the ones thinking outside the box to create progressive solutions that work for your customers.