The Trufla Award for Digital Excellence: McDougall Insurance
The Trufla Award for Digital Excellence goes to a broker who scores the highest on our truScore Digital Reach Tool, and the winner with best digital footprint goes to McDougall Insurance.
We asked McDougall Insurance few questions on how they were able to achieve large strides in the areas of digital and digital transformation. Here are their answers:
Tell us a about your brokerage, what do you specialize in?
We are made up of over 400 employees and over 40 different office locations all over Ontario. For the most part our offices are located in smaller cities and towns where the McDougall brand and name is recognizable and trusted.
We specialize in offering insight and choice to our clients. We are a large brokerage with good relationships with our insurance companies and as a result we can offer a wide range of insurance solutions. Our clients appreciate having a relationship with their broker who can offer knowledge and expertise and find competitive pricing and flexible coverage options for their needs.
We pride ourselves on being Real People working for you and we blend the traditional world with the digital world. We call it tradigital ™ and we like the blend of having a real person to answer the phone or help you when you’re in need but we also try to leverage technology where it makes sense to help our brokers be the best they can for our clients.
What is your philosophy when it comes to innovation?
Our philosophy when it comes to innovation is let someone else try out the new technology first. They can work out the kinks, fix the bugs and that’s where we swoop in and adopt it if we see value. When it comes to innovation we are rarely the first to adopt a new technology but we are always quick to follow. Part of this comes down to the trust element with our clients, if we dive head first into something we don’t know enough about and it doesn’t work we can lose part of our clients trust. We want to be innovative but we don’t rush into things without making sure it is going to be beneficial.
What would you say is your proudest achievement, technology wise?
This award. But to be honest there is not any one thing that we are the most proud of as far as a technology. At this point for us it is the culmination of technologies that make our lives easier and our clients lives easier. We have a self-serve portal for clients, we have a Chatbot that operates 24/7, we have quote and bind insurance products. These can all be great tools if used correctly and if they add value to us or our clients. We are most proud when our clients’ needs are meet with a piece of technology. We still have a long way to go.
Do you have an internal adoption strategy for onboarding your team onto new technology?
We have a dedicated training team in-house who works with our staff to train them on new technologies or initiatives and this is something we have really worked to improve over the past few years. With technologies and workflows changing so frequently and so quickly we have felt it is important to dedicate a team to staying on top of them and making sure the rest of our staff are trained and able to utilize the new technologies to the best of their abilities.
What advice would you give other brokerages who are looking to improve their digital reach?
We are a big organization and do a lot of things in-house because we have the capability but we still rely on the advice and support of experts outside of our organization. We use agencies or technology companies who understand the digital landscape and are experts in their fields to help us with certain projects or initiatives. We also rely on our insurance companies for guidance and input on our digital decisions. I know it can be difficult for brokerages to know where to start but leaning on your network and using the help of others can be very beneficial to help take you where you want to go. And don’t feel like you need to do everything, focus on the things that you are good at and don’t force technology where it doesn’t belong.
What’s next for McDougall?
We are celebrating our 75th Anniversary in 2021 and so we have a few items we are hoping to roll out in the next calendar year. To start we are redesigning our website to provide a better user experience for new clients to McDougall Insurance as well as our existing clients. We are also looking to leverage technology to offer benefits to our clients with our 75th anniversary loyalty program. If there is one big thing on our radar that what we want to accomplish next it would be taking advantage of API’s and the connectivity that now exists in the tech world to bring a better customer experience and a more efficient life for our brokers.
For more information about McDougall Insurance, you can visit their website at mcdougallinsurance.com