Chief Underwriting Officer shares 6 supportive steps amid coronavirus

Each day of the COVID-19 pandemic brings new challenges and questions for Zurich customers and distributors. What hasn’t changed throughout this time is the commitment of Zurich’s leaders and teams to provide as much care and clarity as possible to those we serve. As part of Zurich North America’s Executive Committee, I’m inspired by our various teams’ efforts to provide resources and support for our customers’ resilience. Here are just a few:

• As some of our customers' operations are being repurposed to help with COVID-19 efforts such as turning hotels into hospitals, our market-facing underwriting community has been collaborating on the new exposures to help protect customers from these different but very meaningful risks.
• Our Government & Industry Affairs team has held webinars about the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act) for our customers and distributors to explain how it can provide relief to businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Our Risk Engineers are taking the concept of remote collaboration to a new level via Zurich Risk Advisor. Risk Engineering also quickly developed an array of materials to inform our customers on COVID-19 topics such as ergonomic fundamentals for working from home, hygiene at healthcare facilities, temporary storage of fleet vehicles and many other topics.
• Claims Customer Relationship Management representatives have been reaching out to customers and brokers to answer questions related to COVID-19 and have been responding to customer inquiries our underwriters refer to them. In addition, a cross-functional team from Claims was quickly formed to address potential vendor service interruptions related to COVID-19 to avoid gaps in service to our customers.
• On the Premium Audit front, we are set up to effectively handle audits remotely. We’re working with customers to discuss needs regarding audit timelines.
• For our auto dealer customers, Direct Markets has extended value-added services such as offering a free trial period for Zurich University, which provides dealers with interactive training on a wide variety of topics including compliance and more. We also made a new product available that dealers can choose to market to their customers – ResistAllPurify – which is an anti-viral, disinfectant treatment for vehicle interiors.  

Our COVID-19 Resource Hub offers additional articles and resources on topics such as managing day-to-day operations and developing strategies to protect businesses, employees and communities.