The best leaders can harness crises for innovation opportunities, and that’s what Emily Hartman was able to do in the past year.
Hartman is chief of business teams in the USA for Allianz Partners, responsible for leading the teams that manage travel insurance, event ticket insurance, registration protection and tuition insurance, as well as assistance services and third party claims administration for credit card companies. When the pandemic hit, the company’s core business vanished, requiring quick and difficult adjustments including layoffs and furloughs. When travel came back, business returned at a furious pace -- in the context of a reduced workforce.
Throughout the upheaval, Hartman stayed focused on customers. She says that the pandemic has provided a clear case for travel coverage. The massive amount of travel advisories and closures that extended over a long period of time changed the relationship between people and their trip plans.
“Coronavirus introduced the idea that we don't know what the future holds, more so than we felt in the past,” she says. “You really don't know [if your trip can be interrupted], and not everything is in your control. We hear over and over that peace of mind” is a driver of purchases now, she explains.
Hartman says it became clear almost immediately that this would be the case. She worked with the company’s partners to begin to make adjustments in the short term to meet immediate needs, while also laying the groundwork for the return to travel.
“We had to think about what our exclusions are, how our products currently written, and what is it that we need to do that we may accept new losses, but it's the right thing for the customer and the partner,” Hartman says. “When the State Dept. decided to move 80% of the world to a level four “do not travel” [advisory] -- we have an exclusion that says you must not travel against the government's orders. Well, we never expected them to put 80% of the world on that list.
“We didn't just make short-term decisions. We immediately started new filings to bring in pandemic-related coverages into our products,” she continues. “We could make temporary accommodations for the immediate term and start the filings for new products that would have these benefits embedded in them for consumers, which we have been rolling out since March.”
Integral in these accomplishments was the foresight to start in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, while hard stops left resources on both sides of the equation available.
“A lot of our travel insurance partners put a lot of their own projects on hold -- as you can imagine, their world stopped because they weren’t getting the bookings,” Hartman explains. “We worked with our partners to capitalize on some available resources before they had layoffs and furloughs when they still had available resources. ‘Remember these projects that we've been wanting to do with you? Let's do them now so that when travel returns, you get to capitalize on it.’”
It’s a complex environment, with dozens of partners and coverages and distribution paths. However, the fundamental changes to how travel works are helping those investments pay off already. People are traveling to closer destinations that have entry requirements, like Jamaica and Mexico, and big trips are being planned for years off in the future, but with an understanding that more cover will come along with those.
“Many [Caribbean and Latin American] countries have insurance entry requirements, a minimum amount of medical, you have to have trip interruption in case you have to stay. And that introduced a whole new level of consumers being more aware that trip insurance isn't just about cancellation: It's about these other benefits that are going to protect me while I'm there,” she says. “Meanwhile, people who are planning trips for two years out or more, including round the world cruises -- the bigger the trip and the bigger the investment, the more that you don't mind friction, commitment, and you don't mind doing your homework and your research.”
While working in the maelstrom of COVID and its wake, Hartman also is a mentor in Allianz Partners’ Emerging Leaders program. She said in terms of leadership through a crisis, she advised participants “entirely about collaboration and camaraderie.
“Leave your hat at the door. You're leaning over and helping your teammate. Even though it's in a difficult time with a little bit of an uncertain future, because you're not doing it for yourself, you're doing it for the team and you're doing it for your colleague, it changes the conversation. It makes you even more motivated to get to the top of the mountain and to achieve your goal.
