These are just some of the risks faced by business owners every day – but an app, recently released by global insurer Zurich, could put them firmly in the driver’s seat when it comes to assessing the major hazards within their business.
“As an organisation that operates in an ever-evolving marketplace, Zurich continues to invest in innovations that deliver real value to clients. We’ve developed the Zurich Risk Advisor (ZRA), a digital app designed to help brokers and their clients make their risk management initiatives even more successful,” explains Mervyn Rea, Head of Risk Engineering at Zurich.
“There are several components to the app, but the main focus is the self-assessment portion. For the first time in the insurance industry, this app allows both customers and brokers to do an assessment themselves to produce a relevant risk rating score, using the same methodology used by Zurich’s own risk engineers.”
The app not only creates an opportunity for insurance brokers to have a risk conversation with their clients, but it also delivers data-rich reports that can be used to engage with customers and add value to client relationships.
Acknowledged by Bain & Company as a tool that helps Zurich to rank highest among its peers in the risk assessment stage, ZRA is free to download and use by both brokers and customers.
“It provides a self-risk assessment for Property (Fire), Cyber Security and Worker Injury. Each of these modules has a full, comprehensive version that includes ideas for risk improvement and a light version, the latter of which is a very quick and easy process that can help to generate a broad, simple assessment,” Rea says.
“The light self-assessment takes less than 10 minutes to complete and a report can be emailed in PDF format. For brokers, this provides an opportunity to work with their clients to complete a brief assessment, which can help them provide risk advice while at the same time, supplementing their submissions to insurers.”
The app also includes a Hazard Analysis and What-if Analysis, which may provide a fuller risk profile and an outline of opportunities for improvement to reduce risk.
Many organisations globally are already using the app effectively to manage risk, Rea says.
“There is one large clothing retailer with a national footprint of stores across the UK. They have insurances in place and our risk engineers inspect their larger, high-value locations and distribution warehouses. However, we wouldn’t ordinarily send our engineers out to their regional stores,” Rea says.
They’re now using the app to complete those assessments themselves, which enables Zurich to provide benchmarked reports and highlight which locations are performing above or below the average.
“We’re so proud of this initiative, as the Zurich Risk Advisor app is a valuable tool that empowers brokers to help their customers assess their risks and implement an effective risk management strategy,” Rea adds.
“Developing this app has been so important to us because over the last decade or so, the focus has been fixed on the price of insurance—and this is an opportunity to help our brokers move the focus of their customer engagements towards advice.”
“It promotes a robust risk management culture and process, which can ultimately help our customers to minimise loss and avoid incidents from occurring in the first place.”
Download the Zurich Risk Advisor App today on iOS or Android and see how easy it is to start a risk conversation with your clients.
