The Future of Insurance Podcast – Mark Seich
Chief Customer Experience Officer, Berkley Fire & Marine
Season 3, Episode 17, September 27, 2022
Guest Bio
Mark Seich has many years of experience with major national and super regional P&C carriers in the industry. Starting in early field management roles, then operational roles leading to leadership responsibilities. Prior to joining Berkley Fire & Marine in January 2020 as Vice President of Marketing, Sales & Distribution, he served as regional vice president overseeing distribution responsibility for a 5 state, over $250 million book of personal and commercial lines business. In his current role as Chief Customer Experience Officer, Mark leads the digital transformation of our products, systems, distribution, and overall experience of our agent and broker partners and policy holders. He also leads all marketing and sales driving initiatives through the field teams and our online distribution channel.
Mark received his Bachelor’s Degree from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, an M.B.A. focused on executive management from Ashland University, and holds the CIC designation.
Highlights from the Show
- Berkley Fire & Marine is the specialty niche market for Inland Marine within W.R. Berkley, including Builders Risk, Truch-based Cargo – basically anything that’s property, moving around, in a short-term fashion
- Mark joined to focus on their digital distribution efforts, but the company realized that the customer experience was a critical success factor in digital, so his role broadened
- Specialty Commercial hasn’t had much of a CX focus so far, especially as compared to Commercial Lines more broadly or especially in Personal Lines
- That means Specialty can take lessons learned from Personal lines to see where to focus efforts to catch up
- Unlike Personal or much Small Commercial, Specialty Lines like what Berkley Fire & Marine write is even more distant from the customer or the end user
- Claims is an area where experience really matters and can ensure an account doesn’t get marketed because of the expertise a specialist within Claims brings
- Not only are the product specialized, the customers for each product are highly specific, making it hard to find scalability in approaches or solutions, and it complicates the persona work for someone focused on customer experience like Mark and his team
- That means working for find what can be consistent, while also looking for flexibility in any solution to speak to the highly specific needs of each product and segment
- Looking ahead, there’s a need for Specialty to get a push on having more of a CX focus
- More broadly, what customer buying patterns are, expectations are permeating from personal experiences to commercial and complex experiences, and for most insurers in any line of business, the post-bind experience generally falls off a digital, seamlessness cliff
- The flexibility in Inland Marine to manuscript and adjust the form for each risk also creates complexities for automation and scalability to make things easier and smoother for customers, brokers and internal resources because each policy may be different and highly-manual
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This episode is brought to you by The Future of Insurance thought leadership series (future-of-insurance.com) from Bryan Falchuk.
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