Quadrant Quick Take: Insurers use VR to train adjusters, underwriters, and loss control engineers—and create a safer future.
Just a couple of years ago, virtual reality was considered to be a kind of toy for video game developers. Today, however, VR is being used by a wide range of industries, including insurance, where it’s helping carriers do training, research, and even product development. And more applications are in the works; while large P&C insurers still build physical houses and other structures for adjustor training, VR will soon enable them to create a wide variety of highly detailed virtual structures for adjusters to learn from—faster, more accurately, in greater detail, and at much lower cost.
Along with industry training, insurers are now using VR to communicate with their customers. Allianz uses smart phone-based VR to highlight the possibility of home accidents to prospective policyholders. Similarly, UK-based Liverpool Victoria created a print ad that prospects can scan into their phones to explore a virtual house while learning about the various components of the home—cars, pets, etc.—that can be insured. Other, more elaborate prospect education tools are in the works.
On another front, health care researchers are testing novel ways to incorporate VR into patient rehabilitation, while workers’ comp insurers are using it to better train adjusters and underwriters. Companies like Hong Kong-based Gammon Construction Limited and global giant Bechtel are using it to improve site safety, provide virtual training, and reduce training-associated travel costs.
The rapid adoption of VR, in both insurance-specific and insurance-related applications, is one more way technological development is changing—and in some ways disrupting—the insurance industry. This is a challenge, but it’s also a great opportunity. Our industry helps put boundaries between people and danger by making the determinations we make every day: what’s insurable and what’s not, and at what cost.
The better our adjusters, underwriters, and loss control engineers are equipped to do that—using virtual reality or any other newly proven technology—the better partner we’ll be to our customers and to society at large.
At Quadrant, we’re working nonstop to learn about new technologies and pass that understanding to our clients, both because it will make them better competitors, and because it will help them make the world a safer place. The bottom line: this is a great industry, and it’s really going places. Don’t get left behind.
At Quadrant Information Services, our business is helping p&c insurers become better competitors in a competitive world. Check out what we have to offer—it may surprise you!