Nationwide’s Casey Kempton has a vision to bring positive vibes back to engagements between personal lines insurers and their customers—and it starts with understanding the “mental models” that homeowners and drivers reference to understand insurance.
Executive Summary
A mental model that helps customers feel they have more control—and to have more trust in their insurers—can be developed through the good experiences that Nationwide and other insurers are helping to create with the help of smart home device partners and good-driving nudges from telematics programs, Casey Kempton, president of Nationwide Personal Lines, believes.
Kempton is leaning on her research background in cognitive anthropology to understand the current mental models of personal lines customers, with an eye toward helping them to develop new ones based on positive engagements.
Kempton, who has been president of Nationwide Personal Lines for just about a year, has a research background in cognitive anthropology—in her words, “the understanding of culture as it exists in the minds.”
For the last two decades, she has been observing the insurance customer culture—and the mental models they rely on—like “switch and save.” Those shortcuts to understanding personal lines insurance are ripe for change, she believes.
“I think the industry, in general, has an opportunity to bring the value of the protection that we provide on multiple dimensions [into] a much more positive light than the way that we, collectively, have engaged customers previously,” she told Carrier Management recently.
Kempton was responding to a question about why she chose to accept a position in personal lines, after most recently leading commercial lines digital business initiatives at Chubb, at a time when both auto and homeowners insurers were dealing with their biggest challenges in decades. In short, there’s a lot of opportunity to put an understanding of mental models to work in personal lines, she suggested.
