Insurance: Rising to the Moment

COVID-19 is changing the way companies are doing business

Insurers play a crucial role in helping customers during times of risk and uncertainty. We must remain flexible and adaptable to the current economic, market and environmental conditions.

As an industry, our top priority is to protect the health and safety of our customers, employees and partners. Part of protecting our customers includes creating new and different ways to serve them during unprecedented times, like the current pandemic.

The way people interact with companies — how they shop and how they regard brands — is transforming before our eyes, and the insurance industry is no exception. This provides an opportunity for insurers to reevaluate how, when and where we serve our customers and other key stakeholders.

Changing customer behavior patterns and market conditions due to COVID-19 have specifically placed acute pressure on insurance industry strategies and business models. According to Accenture, the average North American insurer lost 41% in market capitalization.

Behavioral shifts like working from home and growing expectations for seamless online customer care are changing the way companies are doing business. Now more than ever, insurers must have a proactive and deliberate approach to strategy and innovation to help us navigate these unfamiliar waters.

At CSAA Insurance Group, we’ve responded to this crisis by transforming not only how we work, but also how we provide care for our customers.

For our members

As people across the country are driving 30–50% less during stay-at-home and safer-at-home measures, we’ve provided approximately $137 million in refunds to our auto insurance customers. We’ve also offered flexible payment options and policy payment leniency, and extended auto insurance coverage — at no additional cost — for drivers who are using their personal vehicles to deliver food and medicine. We want to make this situation as stress-free as possible for our customers.

In our Claims organization, our teams rapidly adapted to the shelter-in-place orders and significantly improved our virtual, touchless approaches to claims adjusting and inspections. We have been using virtual tools for several years now, but we’ve ramped up our efforts to meet the increased need and demand. For example, a customer can send us photos of their auto vehicle damages via an app on their phone, which will subsequently walk them through the claims process. Similarly, we’re using video calls for virtual home inspections, which allows customers to talk face to face with their claims representative, who can capture photos and discuss in real time.

For our employees

Employee safety and well-being are paramount to us. We quickly transitioned 98% of our in-office employees to work from home. We continue to monitor the regional, state and federal directives and best practices to determine next steps. When we do return to our offices — which we expect will begin this fall — we’ll be going back in phases. We’ll continue to have a significant portion of our employees work from home through the end of the year, with no location having more than 40% of employees in the office at any given time to allow for adequate physical distancing. We are continuously monitoring and adjusting our approach as appropriate, and can pivot quickly if conditions warrant some or all of our employees returning to working from home in the months ahead.

In trying times like these, we want to help ease employee stress. Our goal is to provide our employees peace of mind as we shift our focus to the new challenges before us and our customers. In addition, any employee who contracts the virus will be given additional sick leave, and we are providing virtual and on-demand wellness and meditation sessions.

Mental health is a big focus for us this year and beyond. Taking care of our team’s mental and emotional health during these stressful times is key. UnitedHealthcare, one of our employee healthcare providers, is offering a free mental health line available to anyone — not just CSAA Insurance Group employees. The toll-free help line (866.342.6892) provides access to specially trained mental health specialists.

We also recently joined One Mind at Work, a global employer-led coalition that works to improve mental health in the workplace. Through their network, we’ll be able to build collaborations with other employers, share insights and hear from experts in this area, and they also provide assessment tools.

In that same spirit, we recently teamed up with Health Advocate to offer a webinar that includes tips for weathering financial issues in challenging times, taking a deeper look into budgeting and managing finances.

Engaging employees and encouraging innovation during this time is key for our organization. We recently held an internal enterprise-wide COVID-19 Impact Response and Emerging Opportunities Innovation Challenge to identify ways we can support the immediate needs of the crisis and emerging opportunities to improve our business. Our front-line employees are in a great position to identify key insights and opportunities to better serve our customers and communities. The COVID-19 Innovation Challenge has left us with a strong pipeline of new ideas we are already beginning to explore. For example, two community-minded ideas we’re looking into pursuing further include leveraging our call centers to assist in contact tracing and uncovering ways we can better serve our LatinX customers.

We continue to gather feedback from employees and assess the situation in order to inform our 2021 planning.

For our community

We have a strong connection with the communities we serve. As their needs continue to evolve in the coming months and years, we remain flexible with the support we provide so we can meet their needs now and in the future.

Our company is committed to volunteerism, pro-bono work and charitable giving. Early on we made $70,000 in charitable donations to respond to community needs, and we recently announced $300,000 in additional philanthropic support to organizations across the country. With the crisis of social unrest and racial injustice in our country, this most recent round of contributions includes support for Black, Latino and Native American communities, with $25,000 grants to national organizations — such as Race Forward, UnidosUS and First Nations Development Institute.

In coordination with our cafeteria services partners, since March 16 we’ve been investing approximately $25,000 per week in making our cafes and their staff available to provide meals for our communities. At several office locations, we’re providing approximately 500 daily meals with the support of our community partners: The Food Bank of Contra Costa and Solano (Concord, Calif.), Trinity Center (Walnut Creek, Calif.), Putnam Clubhouse (Concord, Calif.), the Area Agency on Aging (Glendale, Ariz.), the Homeless Alliance (Oklahoma City).

As part of our ongoing program to match employee donations to non-profits up to $250,000 annually, we are offering a special 2:1 match of employee donations to the National Foundation for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC Foundation) and Feeding America.

Finally, we have donated 700 N-95 masks from a supply kept for our natural-disaster response teams to two California Bay Area hospitals.

Emerging Stronger

The COVID-19 pandemic and current social unrest are testing us as companies and individuals like never before. Our hope is, in providing a variety of services and resources to help our various stakeholders at this difficult time, it will help us all weather these challenges together. The only way forward is to take care of each other. And while we don’t know exactly how or when, we will get through this together and hopefully emerge stronger on the other side.