Q&A: Business Continuity in the Digital Age

Running day-to-day operations is a challenge when your employees aren’t all in the same physical location.

Although the Canadian P&C insurance industry is an essential service (and is therefore allowed to keep its offices open), most the industry’s workforce has been working remotely from home since Mar. 11, when the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus to be a global pandemic. It’s part of a social distancing effort to reduce the spread of the virus.

The question of how to orchestrate the efforts of the workforce when your employees are working in isolation from one another came up following the first episode of our webinar series in mid-April, COVID-19: Business Continuity in the Digital Age. Here’s how webinar panellist Steve Whitelaw, vice president of broker and industry partnerships at Applied, tackled the question.

Q&A with Steve Whitelaw (Mar. 28, 2020)

Q: Can you share any best practices for managing multiple teams remotely? So far, we have seen duplication and coordinating communication is a constant challenge.

A: According to a recent Salesforce survey, 78% of customers expect to solve complex issues by speaking to one person. Enabling employees to leverage a single cloud-based, integrated system will empower them to provide customers the service they need in a single call. Such a system will provide a complete view of clients and prospects to each person in the brokerage, so that the individual employees will be able to act upon the information regardless of their role, the time, or location. Using standardized workflows will connect your team to clients, prospects, and insurer partners in a workflow tailored to your business and thereby reduce duplicating your efforts.

Feature image by iStock.com/elenabs