What ails the life insurance industry today? Well the biggest worry is lapsation. They have other worries too – like the Swarup committee report, the small ticket size, the poor public image, the lack of communication skills in the sales force…but clearly the biggest worry is lapsation.

It beats me completely as to how an industry (leaving out the boss, LIC) has not been able to do one story of successfully settling a claim! If life insurance is bought by people to protect their loved ones – is it not logical that the media should be full of stories on how they settled a claim quickly and put the family back on its feet. Well not a single story. Not yet. And I have spoken to a few life insurance companies.

The other area of regret is projection of the agent! Of course the agent is not spoken at all by any of the advertisements, barring Bajaj. This person is no paragon of virtue – the kind of stories that they can tell is amazing. Many of them specialize in ripping the client, but there are many decent folks too. Mostly it is the case of not telling the client the whole story, but the life insurance industry has never (repeat never) celebrated the ‘good’ agent. Every agent aspires for being the ‘biggest’ agent rarely (or almost never) the best agent. Even companies like Max New York Life which is more dependent on the agency force, has not (never?) spoken about how the ‘agent’ can help the customer ‘find a solution’. Really sad, and I hope somebody from Max is reading this blog :). To me the Max route of creating ‘best’ agents is itself looking good – even they are not (not yet I presume?) celebrating the good agent.

So ..what ails the industry? Poor, pathetic and inadequate communication with the end customer! So even if you have a few hundred million rupees as your advertising budget you are not creating enough of an impact. Sad.