Creating an online customer experience is table stakes today

Q&A with Nicole Buckenmeyer, Head of Distribution, Marketplace and LIDMA President

As insurance carriers face mounting pressure to modernize their distribution channels, the 2024 LIDMA Conference & Showcase emerges as a critical junction for industry transformation. This September gathering brings together carriers, insurtechs, and vendors to tackle the industry’s most pressing challenge: bridging the gap between traditional underwriting processes and contemporary consumer expectations for instant, digital-first insurance experiences

Nicole Buckenmeyer does double duty in the insurance world, serving as both Head of Distribution, Marketplace at Zinnia and President of the Life Insurance Direct Marketing Association (LIDMA). For Nicole, the life insurance industry is, at its core, about helping regular people ensure financial protection for their loved ones in case the worst happens — but she’ll be the first to say that the industry can sometimes get in its own way. We caught up with her before the event to get a preview of the ideas that will be shared at the forum.

What should be the key takeaways from the event?

The evolving insurance landscape demands a multi-faceted approach to modernization. Insurance executives should prioritize significant investments in digital infrastructure that can support end-to-end online purchasing experiences. This foundation needs to be complemented by strategic partnerships with technology vendors who can accelerate innovation and bring specialized capabilities to the table. Equally critical is the streamlining of approval processes – moving away from traditional, time-consuming underwriting methods toward more agile systems that maintain risk management integrity. While building these technical capabilities, executives must also focus on customer education initiatives to address persistent misconceptions about life insurance costs and accessibility. Finally, the integration of instant approval capabilities has become non-negotiable in meeting modern consumer expectations, requiring careful balance between speed and underwriting rigor. Success in today’s market requires executives to orchestrate these priorities in parallel, rather than treating them as sequential initiatives.

How does Zinnia’s life insurance marketplace model (including Policygenius) benefit consumers?

We make it accessible and easy for Americans to buy life insurance. Really, that’s what it boils down to. People expect more of an Amazon experience, which is to be able to go online, compare, and make an easy purchase for life insurance. That’s one of the things that we’re trying to enable.

What are some of the challenges in reaching new people who would benefit from life insurance products?

Well, number one is really a lack of awareness and understanding about the process and also how affordable it can be. Many people overestimate the cost of term life insurance and underestimate their mortality. There’s many folks that I talked to when I sold life insurance who would say “I’m not going anywhere, I can’t afford to go anywhere.”

And I would say “it would be great if we had a choice, [but] we don’t always have a choice.” That’s the sort of thing that you have to really raise more awareness about. So you have to let them know that it is easy, it’s a simple process, and that there are affordable options and they can cancel it any time.

What parts of the insurance buying process do you think the industry can improve that would make it a better experience?

There’s a few things that carriers and vendor partners are working on. First of all, we need to provide an online approval process. So a customer needs to be able to go online, they need to have choice in being able to select [a policy and a carrier], which we give them. But when they go through that selection process and choose a company, they need to be able to go through that process seamlessly without having to stop, and go get medical records, or have lab work done.

It should be a seamless process, all the way to the purchase of the life insurance at the end of that journey. So it shouldn’t take you more than an hour. You should be able to secure and pay for your life insurance policy at the end of it — instant approval is close to solving that problem.

But there’s other things like electronic health records (EHRs). So instead of having to go through this really painful process where a customer has to fill out a doctor’s special authorization form and then wait weeks for a copy service to copy their records and send them to the insurance company so that the underwriter can review them, now we’re moving more towards electronic health records. So we can have records instantaneously. Unfortunately, not everyone is there yet, but it’s getting better.

Part of the LIDMA mission is to facilitate connection and collaboration between different parts of the life insurance industry — carriers, vendors, etc. Why is that important?

I’ve been involved with LIDMA for over 20 years, and what I discovered about LIDMA really early on is that everybody involved wants to make it easier for America to protect their families with life insurance. The problem is that we’re all doing it in a silo and we all have different ideas about how to make that happen.

So we’ve got vendors that are coming up with solutions that don’t plug into the carriers and don’t make sense for the direct-to-consumer business model. And so part of what LIDMA did is we pulled in the vendors, we pulled in the carriers and we said, guys, we all have to work together to make this work because we are all coming to the table with different solutions.

The carrier solutions didn’t even make sense with how many hoops you had to jump through for the customer to like get an electronic policy, for example. They were so out of touch with the customer’s needs.

And so that’s where we’ve been able to step in and say, “Hey, we deal with the customers all day every day, I can tell you what they will and won’t tolerate and what they’re asking for.” And then we go work on those solutions together. So we’ve teamed up, and that obviously allows us to get a lot more done and then to provide the right solutions.

What do you think the life insurance industry is doing right?

This sounds a little Pollyanna, but we’re partnering together. The reality is that you have an industry full of people that really care. For example, at LIDMA, when you’ve got someone on stage that’s talking about how they’ve been impacted by their dad that died when they were six and didn’t have life insurance … you’ve got presidents of insurance companies bawling their eyes out.

These are people that come together that truly care and they want to make a difference. It’s just a very old stodgy industry that is hard to move, but that’s why people like us are here. And so we’re trying to help them see other ways to solve these problems.

But the biggest thing that we’ve got going for us is we have a group of people that truly care, and so we will find the solutions.