The Changing World of Work

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Transcription:

Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio for the authoritative record.

Patti Harman (00:06):
Welcome to the DigIn podcast. I’m your host, Patti Harman, editor in chief of Digital insurance. The insurance industry has been facing a talent shortage for two decades, but following the pandemic, staffing deficiencies in all areas highlighted the need for strong recruitment efforts. More than ever, technology is changing some of the skill sets needed and encouraging a focus on upskilling and re-skilling. In some areas, the hiring challenge can be felt across most industries. And for insurers, this is impacting the areas of auto and property where staffing shortages, affect the repair and the rebuilding process after a claim. My guest today is Ken Tolson, global president of Network Solutions at Crawford and Company, a claims management firm. Ken oversees Crawford’s digital solutions, including all digital data and technology initiatives. He has extensive experience in building highly technical and professional teams that excel in meeting customer objectives, and he has spent the last 30 years exploring and embracing innovative approaches to the claims process. Thank you so much for joining us today, Ken.

Ken Tolson (01:22):
It’s my pleasure to join you.

Patti Harman (01:24):
So it’s been interesting. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in less than 15 years, approximately 50% of the insurance workforce will retire, and that’s going to leave a significant deficit across the insurance ecosystem. And while we know that technology can help mitigate some of the personnel losses, the institutional knowledge that’s lost will have a huge impact. Are there certain areas of insurance where you think the loss will be more acutely felt?

Ken Tolson (01:56):
This has been a recurring theme for the really last 10 to 15 years. Inside, especially my world, which is mostly focused on the claims ecosystem, but it’s been a recurring theme across the entire insurance space, whether you’re in sales, whether you’re in underwriting or you’re in claims, and our leadership has been focused on it for some time. It’s a critical mass issue in terms of the aging of the population, but also not being able to attract new talent into what is a growing marketplace in the U.S. And there’s lots of factors that affect that, but this is not a new problem and there’s not a single solution to the problem. And I’ve seen our response evolve over the past several years just simply from focusing on recruiting to focusing on training. And I know we’ll dig into some of these themes, but it is not a new problem. But is it ever growing just beneath the surface issue for the entire marketplace? And if people aren’t focused on it, they better get focused on it really quickly.

Patti Harman (03:01):
Very true. I know when I first started covering the insurance industry quite a while ago, I was talking to a group of executives and they’re like, yeah, we’re really seeing that this is going to be an issue. And now 10, 15 years later, it is even a much more acute issue. And as I’ve spoken to sources in multiple industries, they’re feeling the effects of the talent shortage, whether it’s auto repairs or property damage or construction to name a few. How are these challenges affecting the insurance industry and the insurance adjacent surface providers?

Ken Tolson (03:39):
We have so many factors in play here today. It’s the talent shortage itself, but people leaving the industry as well. We’ve had a number of things happen over the past few years. The pandemic was one factor around that, but the aging out of the population itself and also the change in the way claims are managed today from a technological standpoint, process innovation standpoint, and that’s driving to push people into different areas of the business or even out of the business based on their skillset, whether it’s auto repair or it’s property damage assessment or working in the field. Traditional field type roles have been disrupted by some technology but also just changes in process that are part of the evolution of the industry itself. So they’re affecting every aspect of not just the claims organization, but the underwriting organizations out there, the way they go about conducting their day-to-day business. And that change, that pace of change. I always say the pace of change is ever increasing. That pace of change just continues to accelerate and therefore our agility to deal with that pace of change has to continue to keep pace.

Patti Harman (04:48):
That’s really important because insurers especially have been focusing on finding new and different ways to bring folks into the industry. And that leads into my next question, which are what are some of the ways that the insurers and the companies they work with are addressing the talent shortage?

Ken Tolson (05:09):
Now, I can speak from my own perspective. Over the past probably five years, we’ve really worked in a couple of really key areas, and one is through targeted recruiting and really through key partnerships. We’ve partnered with community college systems, other training organizations around the country, especially in the U.S. market. I’m primarily speaking from a U.S. perspective right now, but those key partnerships are targeting marketing and recruiting and also employee engagement. So really trying to reach the right talent and people who have the right skillsets, people that are people-centric, empathetic. We’re looking for the core fundamentals and we can teach technical skill, but that’s really a key takeaway for me. Also, the other way they’re tackling this is, we already touched on it, is process optimization. How can we do more with fewer people? And unfortunately that has led to some offshoring of functions as well.

(06:10)

So there’s lots of different ways to attack this problem. And what I see across the whole carrier landscape and the claims landscape especially is not a single approach. They’re attacking it from every single angle around optimization of process disruption, disruptive technologies that they’re bringing in, and then really just the optimization of the overall re-imagining of claim process to use different tools, different capabilities. But I think the third most important component for us, and I don’t see this consistently across the industry, is the investment in training. When you look at all the tools and capabilities that adjusters and especially in the claims side of the world need today, training is absolutely critical. And we’ve seen the training landscape change and evolve with the change in the industry as well. The core fundamentals around how do you deal with people and how do you communicate with people. Those will always be constants in our space, but the technical training has had to really change to adapt and keep up with what’s happening in the marketplace.

Patti Harman (07:08):
I agree. There’s been a lot going on in that space and especially since insurance technology seems to be changing almost overnight. And I know that you’re involved with Crawford’s digital data and technology initiatives. So what kinds of technology are you implementing and how are your teams using technology in new ways then

Ken Tolson (07:31):
New ways? Just looking back over back to 2020 when the pandemic really changed the way we do things. I always say that a lot of these capabilities were already being experimented with like self-service and virtual virtual inspection capabilities and virtual process management. These things were underway. The pandemic simply accelerated a lot of these things. So we’ve made significant investments, we’re already making investments in this. Some of the macroeconomic forces around the pandemic forced us to accelerate some of that. And luckily most companies were in a very good position. They were already heading down this path anyway. And I know people hear this all the time, but one of the big investment areas we’re at another inflection point in the industry right now with the onset of generative ai.

(08:21)

It wouldn’t be a conversation today that it didn’t come up at least once or twice, but really what we’re doing with AI and what we’re seeing the industry do with AI is really the new frontier of what we see is going to be a change in the way we conduct business in the claim space. And our focus right now is around what we were already doing, how we can apply AI to accelerate processes around our triage investment, which is about claim segmentation, what we’re doing with coverage interpretation. And then thirdly, the sort of third leg of the stool for us is around what we’re doing in the call center, how do we leverage AI to make our people better, to make us more responsive? Because all of the investment we’re making in technology is really about driving a superior customer experience. That’s what our clients expect. And so we always try to keep that in mind when we’re making decisions around investing is what makes the most impact to the customer and that our clients can feel. And that’s sort of our bias around how we approach that.

Patti Harman (09:22):
That’s really interesting. Well, everyone that I’ve spoken to is definitely worried about the customer experience and how it’s going to affect their customers. Can you talk a little bit more about how you’re using it in your customer call centers then?

Ken Tolson (09:35):
So there are already some fantastic tools out there that AI can listen to calls and actually help instruct the agent to ask and uncover additional questions or answers to questions to help us triage the claim better. And there’s a prime example, like an automobile accident type of claim reporting scenario where if someone mentions that someone else was in the vehicle, it will actually redirect that individual to say, make sure you capture the seating position, make sure you capture the age and the relationship to the occupant in the vehicle. So it helps rather than have to script everything and go through and anticipate every permutation of an FNOL first notice of loss type of query, it can help do that responsibly. It actually helps us coach agents as well so they get better by using the tool itself. So it was fascinating to me to see it happen the first time and its ability to listen in real time and provide feedback in real time is new, relatively new, and it’s just a phenomenal technology. So what we’re trying to do right now is how do we operationalize that? How do we actually make that a reality for our employees that are sitting in that seat every day? Because that’s a tough seat to sit in. You’re dealing with the public all the time. We want to give them the best tools to wrap around them to make them more effective and more efficient at their job.

Patti Harman (11:03):
That is just fascinating to me and such a great way to use AI. And it’s interesting because I’ve been involved in a lot of different activities to expose high school and college students to the insurance industry and help them to see what the different opportunities are, and we’re competing with companies like META and Amazon, and anybody who has a large digital footprint and the use of AI, I think, in the insurance industry is just going to kind of change the landscape and who we’re able to attract going forward as companies and insurers and brokers are just trying to work out and reach that next generation. What are some of the challenges to expanding your use of technology in these different areas?

Ken Tolson (11:51):
Well, the biggest challenge right off the bat is anytime you’re introducing something new is really the change management around it. I actually am in the digital solution space, am responsible for a very small team. We are considered like a startup within our overall ecosystem, but I think that half of our focus and attention is around educating our employee base and even our client base about the possibilities of using AI and using other technologies. So our goal is to cast a wide net, to have good understanding of what’s coming into the ecosystem, what’s the realm of possibilities or the art of the possible, but then educating our user base to come along that journey and then demystifying the technology but at the same time assuaging the fears of that technology as well. And really, fear just comes from understanding once people really understand the vision behind how this technology or this capability or this process innovation is going to help them do their jobs better, you can bring people around that table to work together and to really great things, some exciting things are being done right now. And I think that’s what’s most exciting to me is the change that we are seeing as these tools become available to us.

Patti Harman (13:11):
It really is pretty amazing. We have a conference the end of June, our DigIn conference, and we’re going to be looking at some of these different aspects and how we’re using technology for customer service and claims because there isn’t a single aspect of the insurance ecosystem that has not going to be affected by all of these changes and all of this technology. We’ve talked a little bit about this, but what are some of the benefits to using it and then how are your teams adapting to a greater use of technology now?

Ken Tolson (13:43):
Well, the first thing we see is the excitement when the light bulb clicks on about how it can help them do their job, there’s an excitement that just drives adoption and drives energy around it. And there’s nothing more palpable to the customers that they deal with on a day-to-day basis than to have people that are excited about doing their job and happy to have these tools to make it better. Because the inverse of that is when people feel like you’re just throwing another technology at me, you’re not really helping my job do better. And it was funny, I actually was meeting with a carrier customer last week at a conference in Boston and that was exactly where they came from in terms of looking at some of the technology that we were promoting was that it wasn’t about really driving higher productivity from their employee base.

(14:27)

It was how could they lift things off of them to make from a quality of life standpoint so they could compete for the best employees out there. So when people don’t think their employers are serious about taking some of that burden off of them, they hear that loud and clear and they’re looking for tools today to make their employees’ lives easier and put them in a better position and increase their happiness around doing their job because the customers see that. The customers can tell when you have a really motivated and happy employee that’s interacting with your policyholder, they can tell, and I think that’s part of the sort of ROI on some of these capabilities. That’s probably the biggest benefit if it shows up in measurable CX customer experience, that’s winning.

Patti Harman (15:14):
Very true. And a lot of times I think it’s sort of a double-edged sword because they’re afraid that the technology will take their jobs away and be able to do it, and then they’re also concerned that it’ll create some frustration because technology is really only as good as when it’s working because when it’s not, that has a tendency to create a little bit of stress for all of us. So during the pandemic, as we’ve said, everything kind of changed, but I was wondering, I think one of the biggest areas of affected involved the claims process because it was sort of in the early stages of automation. Then how has the claims process changed over the last couple of years now?

Ken Tolson (15:58):
Yeah, there’s no question that the automation pressure is there and the challenge with claims is is that there’s similarities in claims, but it’s true that like snowflakes, no two claims are exactly the same. And so the more you try to automate and commoditize the claim process itself, the more likely you are to have poor customer experience or variability in the customer experience itself. And the very best person in the world is a person to handle and adapt in that decisioning process. AI is getting better, it will get better, but what we want to do is to leverage technology in such a way that it augments what humans are really good at, which is talking to one another and handling the sensitivities of a claim and taking away from them some of the burdensome clicking and just routing of stuff that can be relegated to an AI engine along those lines and the pandemic, the pandemic absolutely accelerated adoption when we could virtualize as much as possible, we wanted to go to low touch and drive self-service, keep people out of people’s homes, facilitate the spacing that was needed for the pandemic.

(17:09)

And so in that respect, the pandemic was a good thing. It forced carriers to look at things differently and I think there’s a hangover effect of that. A good hangover effect of the pandemic impact is that it put that discipline in place to look at other capabilities and constantly be curious about that. So I think that whether it’s what I see today as a direct result of pandemic is more channel segmentation around complexity disparity, and that’s what we’ve tried to do is to leverage those tools that came in where they make sense and they actually do drive good customer experience, but you can’t force the square peg in the round hole sometimes it just takes a person to handle some of these situations and we want to make sure that we don’t get in the way of that for sure.

Patti Harman (17:55):
Well, insurance has always been so relationship-driven and AI is not going to have the same level of empathy and caring that an actual human being is going to have. But as we’re kind of automating this process, how do you think the transition is going then?

Ken Tolson (18:13):
Well, I think the transition is ongoing. The reality for any claims organization is that you really are in a constant state of change, and I think you have to be to stay competitive today. When I look at sort of the industry giants that are out there, and you look at the startups out there, you look at the top five P&C carriers compared to the new startups like Lemonade or a Kin insurance or companies like this that are truly in their infancy but also aren’t bringing a lot of legacy, see a sort of anchor with them as well. They don’t have as much to change. They can be truly innovative. So it’s really exciting. I think both of those forces are good for the ecosystem though because one maybe drives change a lot faster, but the other, there’s two different markets. Not every customer wants the same experience out there. So I think that competition is good for the industry and it makes all of us better having to play in that ecosystem. We have a unique vantage point in that respect because we work for both. We work across that spectrum so we see what others are doing to innovate in that space across the whole spectrum of mature carriers that way. And that’s what I love about our vantage point in the industry

Patti Harman (19:26):
Are where are customers and companies investing to kind of automate the claims process at this point in time, then?

Ken Tolson (19:34):
There’s no doubt that anything that can accelerate the claim process that speed is still a key component to quality. It’s not the only component, but it’s an important component because whether you have an automobile accident or you’ve been injured or you have a property damage to your home or business, the key is restoring as quickly as possible is accurately as possible. So where we see the investment is anything that drives higher accuracy, higher speed, or better customer experience because without a doubt, what I’ve seen over the past probably five years more than anything, is that carriers really know how to measure customer experience and they look at and dissect every touchpoint with the customer to look at what causes a degradation in customer experience. And we’ve worked for the top five carriers, but it applies all the way through the spectrum of the carrier base today.

(20:32)

They can tell you things like if someone gets transferred from one agent to another, that’s a drop of net promoter score of X. They measure it that closely and that’s how serious the competitive landscape is out there to drive the best customer experience, the best outcome. And I know people will hear this and go, well, that wasn’t my experience. And what happens is when that process fails or there’s breaks in that process, that’s when you have the drop in customer experience. And what’s interesting is that as much as people are investing in digital, there was a J.D. Power survey this past year that while people want digital engagement, when you fail in digital engagement and you have a drop in that process, the degradation to net promoter score is even more drastic. They get more frustrated than they would have if it had simply been a human they were dealing with. So there’s a lesson in that for us that is you got to get it right. You got to think through the permutations of what you’re implementing and at the end of the day, take care of the customer.

Patti Harman (21:29):
That is so important and I am glad that you’re really focusing and very attuned to that, and I’m glad that the insurers are as well because I can tell you from my own personal experience when I have to deal with different vendors and things and it’s like, please just give me a real person. Honest to God, it would just solve my problem. And it’s like I have spent a half an hour on hold waiting to get to a real person because I knew that if I could get to an individual, I could say, this is what I need and we could solve it in three minutes type of thing. So I’m really glad that that’s an area that they’re focusing on. What kinds of technology are you using or seeing in the industry to kind of help facilitate the claims process now as we’re automating more of that?

Ken Tolson (22:19):
We are really have been investing, especially since the pandemic about embedding technology tools into our existing claim process. So whether it’s a 3D modeling tool that we can operate via self-service with the homeowner affecting the scans themselves or possibly even like our Looker network or a 10-99 type network that backs those processes up so that we can have a high adoption rate in that. But those tools can also get used then by our adjuster network as well. So we’re looking for tools that can sit in multiple instances of method of delivery, but to drive a highly consistent workflow there. We are always experimenting with self-service tools themselves. We have relationships with a few providers like Hover and Hosta that do interior and exterior scanning for us today, but those tools have been productivity enhancers for our adjusters to be able to spend more time with the homeowner and less time having to measure and scan and photograph.

(23:17)

We see them as both customer experience lifts, but also advantages for our adjuster experience as well. I mentioned the AI tool and the call center piece, the cover AI piece I’m really excited about is to be able to examine the plethora of documents and the variability of endorsements that adjusters have to deal with in specific states. The more you centralize, which has been a theme over the past 10 to 15 years is most of the United States from a claims organization on the large scale is very centralized or completely virtual now. So people sit all over the country, but they may handle multiple states. So they’re dealing with multiple jurisdictions, multiple regulatory environments, multiple endorsement formats and coverage. So what we’re doing is loading that information into a large language model to basically provide guidance to the adjuster, you should look at this sub limit, you should look at this coverage term instead of having to be familiar with every aspect of what could be a manuscript type policy in the Lloyd space or a more consistent in the HO type space or commercial package policy space, but to help direct the adjuster to only what they need to pay attention to in that space.

(24:27)

And then we’ve even seen some instances where we feed, and we’re doing an instance in the UK right now where we feed that data into a large language model and it will attempt to adjudicate the claim, but at the end of the day, we’re simply providing that as guidance to the adjuster to validate it because regulatory-wise, an adjuster’s still going to have to do that. It seemed more as one, it is a human in the loop aspect of it, but at the same time it’s intended to help augment their capabilities and focus them where they need to put their attention.

Patti Harman (24:56):
Right. I was wondering if technology is affecting how adjusters do their job and how are they even adapting to it? I’ve spoken to some and they’re like, oh no, it’s creating more work, and so I’m wondering from your perspective, what have you been seeing and how they’re adjusting?

Ken Tolson (25:16):
Well, so we’re in early stages on the coverage and the cover AI tool right now, and when we’ve shared it, we see excitement. We see people are one amazed to begin with and once they get over the amazement piece that we can actually do this with AI in large language models today, then they think about how it affects their job and how it can make them better, make them more efficient, make them more accurate. Our play with this has been one about accuracy. It’s always about can we do a better job at interpreting coverage? Can we make sure we don’t miss coverage? Can we make sure we apply limits? Are hundred percent accurate? A hundred percent of the time our goal is first accuracy, but then at the same time for the adjuster, that is a key component because if you’re simply lumping more work onto a claims organization, that’s really not a win if you can’t drive accuracy and at the same time and efficiency gain and lift, you look at how the ecosystem has evolved over the past five to 10 years, really the past three to five years, it’s more complex than ever.

(26:16)

There are more tools to do the same job and the complexity of that is exponentially increasing. So we’ve got to be as simple as possible how we implement these tools while at the same time those drops between those tools, what create the customer experience frustration and adjuster frustration. So it’s key that we do that the right way and really think these things through. And what we’re trying to do is to do it, we want to be as fast as possible, but not so fast that we break a lot of stuff. We want to embrace this, but be very intentional about doing it compliantly, doing it with the privacy sensitivity that we need to have. You’ve heard some of the concerns around bias in AI and that’s why the human in the loop is so important right now is keeping that human in that loop so that we can both get better with the tool.

Patti Harman (27:04):
Are there certain pain points that you’ve noticed as the process becomes more automated?

Ken Tolson (27:09):
I think the complexity issue is my big challenge, in that as soon as you channel segment a population of claims it’s the gaps between the channel segmentation where you have the opportunity for failure. If a claim is particularly ready for, you think a claim from triage is ready for managed repair, but then you find out down the life cycle of the claim, it really wasn’t, how do you recover from that? And now that you have more opportunities to channel segment, you have more opportunities for failure and it’s about being thoughtful in that space to be able to recover and not at your solution to recovering from those drops can’t be, well, the insured’s going to figure that out for us. You cannot put that burden onto your customer or you’re going to lose every single time. So I think the challenges are complexity and managing that complexity elegantly.

Patti Harman (28:01):
What are some of the benefits to automating this as you’re getting a little bit further along in the process, what kind of excites you about this and about how technology is changing the insurance space?

Ken Tolson (28:16):
Well, we always look at it from the lens of the customer. And if we’re investing in technology one, it has to make the customer experience, it cannot be a worse customer experience. It has to be as good or better. If it takes our cost out of the claims organization or the underwriting model of a program, then great, but it can’t be at to the detriment of the policyholder experience or the customer experience. I think that is the biggest sort of litmus test for us. I am most excited about continuing to evolve. I think about my own personal journey in this space. I mean, I was a long time ago a front end field property adjuster when I started in this industry many years ago. And I’ve seen this industry go from, I was at the dawn of the computer estimating age for property claims when I first started in this industry on a product called Compute Claim, which hasn’t existed in a very long time, but eventually have all been to the exact wearability and the products that are out there that everybody knows today.

(29:17)

But it’s fascinating to me to see how, not just how the industry has evolved over that timeframe, but also the pace of evolution has continued to accelerate. So our challenge becomes all of the tools that are coming to bear, where do you make your investment? How do you pick your winners in this space? And that’s where we hope that our experimentation, which we are always happy to share with our customers or anybody that wants to listen, we share our failures and we share our successes as well because I think it’s incumbent upon the industry to be open about that. And because at the end of the day, we’re all fighting for this same market all over the same marketplace and also for the benefit of the customer experience.

Patti Harman (30:01):
I remember being at a conference a couple of years ago and a young adjuster came up to me, I had been speaking, I don’t even remember what the topic was, when he came up to me with his cell phone and he said, my goal someday is to be able to handle all of my claims on my cell phone. And I looked at him and I said, that time is coming and it’s going to be here a lot sooner than you realize. And that was probably maybe two or three years ago. So just in terms of seeing how technology has just shifted and changed and been adopted and adapted and just kind of watching everybody go through this entire process.

Ken Tolson (30:40):
I would just add onto that comment of yours is that that was probably the early days of my venture into technology supporting the P&C claim space, was trying to build as much as we could in the mobile app space. And I go back as far as we actually built a Blackberry app and then we built an iOS Android app. And one of the most rewarding things for me is we actually built an app for the U.S. that we connected to the core claims system in our space, and then we transported that application to Canada and did the same thing. So we were able to reach a much broader user base as a result of that. But you’re exactly right, that time is now and the ability to do almost everything from that smartphone in the hands of an adjuster is truly incredible. That day has come and now it’s just maturing honestly.

Patti Harman (31:24):
Exactly. They spend so much time out in the field, it just makes them that much more efficient to be able to handle everything like that. As insurers and brokers and vendors are building their teams for the future, what advice do you have for them?

Ken Tolson (31:39):
I think I thought about this from the standpoint of my own perspective on the industry, and one of the things that’s helped me the most is really being curious. And I say that my employer has been really good to me to indulge that curiosity. I’ve worked in a number of different roles in technology and different aspects of our business, and that’s what I think I seek when I look for really talented individuals in our marketplace is find people that are truly curious about driving change and are willing to adapt to change. I am a big believer in you don’t accept the status quo if you’re really going to move the needle. You need people that can drive change your organization and be receptive to change, and that takes the right type of leadership. People that you don’t use change as a weapon. You have to clearly dictate what that vision is and why we’re making the change.

(32:31)

You don’t change just for the sake of change, but those are the type of people we try to recruit to our organization that truly are curious in nature and willing to take new approaches and reimagine the claim process. And I think that’s what gets me up early in the morning. It’s what keeps the creative focus for me and being able to work somewhere that indulges that and supports that and gives me the same feeling I got from handling claims where you feel like you’re helping people, you’re helping drive change and put an organization in a better place for the future.

Patti Harman (33:10):
I agree. One of the things I tell the teams that I work with is we don’t have to do things the way we’ve always done them. I said, I’m not here to change everything, but if there is a better, faster, smarter way to do that, I encourage you to find that, figure out what works, and then we can make those changes because it’s to everyone’s benefit to be operating at a high level and doing what works and serving our customers or in my case, our readers and listeners. So I really agree with that. We have covered an awful lot over the last few minutes, and I was wondering if there was anything that I haven’t asked you that you think our listeners should know about operating successfully in a changing work environment?

Ken Tolson (33:55):
We have covered a lot of ground, and I would just say that the last theme we struck on, which around being curious is keep an open mind to technologies. Talk to as many people as you can because we’ve all had experience in either investing in new solutions, new process, new capabilities, but staying curious in the marketplace is really critical to being able to lead that next generation and that next disruptive curve that we see coming. I was really proud of how our organization handled the adaptation, that was really forced upon us by the pandemic, and that’s about being ready. We were in a position to be ready to make that change. We’re in an organization that was agile enough to be able to adapt and do it. Was it painful? Yes, there’s always going to be a little bit of pain like that, but it’s kind of like exercising the muscle you didn’t have. There’s going to be a little bit of pain with it, but what comes out on the other side is a better place. So that would be my advice is really striving, keeping an ear to the ground and staying curious about what’s going on in your marketplace and then talk to as many people as possible. You talked about reading, that’s really the way I keep on top of what’s going on and talk to as many people I can in the industry.

Patti Harman (35:09):
Well, thank you so much, Ken for sharing your expertise with our audience today. And thank you to our listeners for listening to the DigIn podcast. I produced this episode with audio production by Adnan Khan. Special thanks this week to Ken Tolson of Crawford and Company for joining us. Please rate us, review us, and subscribe to our content at DigIn. That’s dig-in.com/subscribe. From Digital Insurance, I’m Patti Harman. Thank you for listening.