Insurers Need To Upgrade Their Employees' Writing Skills

No Scud Missiles, Please! It may not show up on a balance sheet, but every time an untrained writer writes a letter, theres the chance of inadvertently “attacking” a claimant, an insured, a commissioner, a broker or an agent.

Negative tone can hurt your company in many ways. It can lose customers, it can generate lawsuits and, if inflammatory rhetoric is found in a discoverable e-mail or log notes, a few words might cost your company a whopping settlement and punitive damages in a bad-faith lawsuit.

Also, you would be amazed at the number of loss control managers and claims managers who rarely use “please” in their writing, and who feel that requesting items from a reader is as simple as just asking for them. They feel no motivation is needed–and then they wait countless weeks while their requests are ignored!

Lost Time Equals Lost Money. For arguments sake, lets assume an adjuster (or examiner, loss control professional, etc.) writes five documents each day. If that person is not a confident writer, there may be as many as five or 10 gaffes per letter. They can be subtle things, like dumping too much information on a reader–perhaps because the writer doesnt really want any chance of a follow-up call.

One loss control manager described one type of letter as “dipped in Vaseline” because “some brokers dont like to be pinned down.” Result? A productivity-wasting series of follow-ups.

Some other writing problems that make letters look bad and hurt productivity are wordiness, failure to come to the point, vagueness, inappropriate tone, stodgy language, poor phrasing, punctuation and grammar errors, lengthy sentences, and lengthy paragraphs.

Where Are Tomorrows Leaders? How much is your company doing to train tomorrows top executives? The higher in the organization you go, the greater the need to write persuasively.

Whether youre in information technology, product development, auditing, claims, underwriting or loss control, you may sit at many meetings during which projections for future growth and new products are discussed. Those presentations can be delightful or deadly, depending on the clarity and organization of the written slides.

Chief information officers and IT managers often comment to me, in frustration, “Why cant people boil down their ideas to a page or two?” Good question. Perhaps because the presenters havent been trained to take responsibility for their viewers attention spans as well as for the impact of the words they choose for each slide.

Our industry is fascinated by new technology. But no technology and/or form letter can ultimately substitute for the conversational nature of the human voice as it emerges in the phrases of a well-written letter from an adjuster to an insured, a loss control manager to a broker, or an examiner to a physician.

Take a good look at the documents your company sends out and remember: Those documents may be the only way by which customers judge your company.

, director of The Communication Workshop, presents on-site seminars to claims, underwriting, loss control and other insurance professionals. His Writing Help Desk service provides individual writing training. For more information, e-mail him at [email protected].

Reproduced from National Underwriter Life & Health/Financial Services Edition, November 4, 2002. Copyright 2002 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.