Rooftop view of the Eaton fire from Koreatown, Los Angeles, California.
Submerged van in the Swannanoa River near Biltmore Village after Hurricane Helene in Asheville, North Carolina.
Recovery strategies for front-line insurance
professionals and their customers
By Maura C. Ciccarelli
Although the insurance industry has tremendous experience in helping insureds after natural disasters, recent CATs have been very extreme—causing people around the country and the world to watch in horror.
Hurricane Helene flooded out North Carolina communities like Asheville even though they were 300 miles inland. Fierce fires destroyed entire Los Angeles communities, displacing thousands and leveling some 16,000 homes and structures.
In both these and other catastrophes over time, insurance professionals have been called to the front lines to deliver on the industry’s mission to restore people’s homes, livelihoods, and communities. These are people who are called to this line of work and want to help those who have been traumatized.
What is the emotional impact of extreme CAT response on insurance professionals and customers alike? How can agency and brokerage staff better serve their insureds by understanding the trauma these unprecedented events caused? And, what can help employees cope in the short term and build up their own capacity to withstand CAT-related trauma in the future?
Trauma 101
According to the American Psychological Association, trauma is the emotional response to a range of events that have extreme impacts on people. Typical incidents include an accident, crime, death of a loved one, or abuse. Natural disasters or widespread events such as war or unrest not only affect those immediately involved but also those who witness the event.
Trauma reactions seem to have become more extreme over the last five years, says Andrew Shatté, Ph.D., chief knowledge officer and co-founder of meQuilibrium, a technology platform company that supports workforce well-being and performance. He points to the COVID pandemic, wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, numerous hurricanes and extreme weather events, and ongoing wildfire emergencies in California and the west. All have threatened people’s ability to bounce back.
“We’ve really learned that we don’t have a lot of control over some really big events,” Shatté says. “You can’t be mentally prepared. It’s the unpredictability that really messes with the human mind more than anything else.”
Front-line insurance professionals are feeling nearly as much of the trauma as their customers, says Mark Debus, MSW, LCSW, clinical manager of behavioral health for Sedgwick, the claims management company. “When you’re working a catastrophe claim, employees are affected by secondary exposure to trauma,” he says. “That manifests itself exactly the same way as front-line exposure to trauma.”
Symptoms can include difficulty sleeping, problems with stress management, ruminating thoughts, startle reactions, and hypervigilance. “All of those can show up in folks who are facilitating claims,” Debus notes.
“When you face a crisis, you just have to take it one step at a time,” says Steven Brown, head of Acrisure Personal Risk and Private Risk Advisors, which provides insurance, financial advice and wealth management services. Prior to this, he owned Hoffman Brown Company, a boutique agency that was the June 2004 Rough Notes cover agency and that joined Acrisure in 2021.
“The fires were so exceptionally large that people in the city of Los Angeles are experiencing an equally large trauma no matter where they are,” notes Brown, who lives in Los Angeles (he and his family were safe) and heard about the devastation first hand from many Pacific Palisades customers.
One of the key reasons for trauma, says Shatté, is that disasters completely undermine people’s fundamental “iceberg” belief that if they work hard enough and, in a sense, are “good” enough, bad things won’t happen to them. However, disasters are the ultimate unpredictable accidents where no one can be sure they are safe.
“These iceberg beliefs enable us to move around in a dangerous world,” says Shatté, author of The Resilience Factor: 7 Keys to Finding Your Inner Strength and Overcoming Life’s Hurdles. “They give us a mental armor to feel that we are protected.”
But, when disasters strike, people directly affected or near to those who are get “a very stark reminder that very bad things can happen to really good people. It shakes us up globally,” he says.
Customer connections
during CATs
During Brown’s agency days, the initial job during disaster response was to help people as human beings first and then finding ways to make their challenges better as their insurance agency. Today, he says, Acrisure tracks natural disasters and can instantaneously build a list of clients in the affected areas.
“We could reach out to them and tell them how we are able to help, and to provide them with comfort, too,” he says. “This was a tremendously powerful method, not only for our clients’ well-being but also for our staff’s.”
During evacuations, Brown says, customers feel terrified about whether their families were going to be safe, if what they owned would still be there when they came back, and if the insurance contract was something they could truly depend on. He regularly tells customers that, in his experience, carriers may have their own guidelines for interpreting coverage but make fair decisions within the scope of the policies.
Debus notes that empathetic staff take time to explain the process and make sure customers understand their coverage. “Empathy is literally putting yourself in someone else’s shoes to build connections,” he says. “You see this all the time between claims professionals and victims of trauma, fires, and disasters.”
Being careful and sensitive when asking people to recount their experience also is important, Debus warns. Ask about the loss or the damage and about moving forward, but not about the event itself.
“Don’t ask people to relive their trauma because that actually causes them to be re-traumatized,” he advises. “You have to walk a very fine line between investigation and re-traumatization.”
Start by couching it with an apology that you have to ask questions that might seem intrusive, and emphasize they are welcome to not answer those. “You can also say, ‘my understanding is that x, y and z happened in this order. Is that correct?’” he explains.
“We’ve really learned that we don’t have a lot of control over some really big events. … It’s the unpredictability that really messes with the human mind more than anything else.”
—Andrew Shatté, Ph.D.
Chief Knowledge Officer and Co-founder
meQuilibrium
Also, take advantage of maps of damaged areas, police reports, news about particular neighborhoods, and other reports from public authorities. “You can get a lot of information about the loss without asking someone to relive that experience,” Debus says.
How can you tell if people are experiencing emotional effects from trauma? Shatté, who has studied resilience for decades, says seven negative emotions may arise during customer interactions:
- Anger, particularly if they feel they are not being treated fairly.
- Anxiety and worry about getting their lives back to normal.
- Frustration, especially if they are focused on the lack of resources available to them.
- Sadness over the loss of their loved ones, property, or their old way of life.
- Guilt over not doing enough or letting their family down.
- Shame about not being able to control the situation.
- Embarrassment around feeling like a victim.
Shatté agrees that giving people control throughout the claims process helps to restore their mental health.
Staff support
“Trauma is not limited solely to the customers,” Brown notes. “We know we are there to serve the public. But, our first step is to focus on our staff, making sure they can take care of their own families during a catastrophe that affects their region. They can’t be effective [in customer service] if they can’t focus on what is critical in their own lives.”
To help agency and brokrage staff cope, Brown recommends:
- Acknowledging that trauma exists, not just for the person who had severe damage to their property but also for the agency staff members who are helping them.
- Agency leaders showing their front-line commitment to service by picking up the phone and helping people reporting a claim. “When a teammate sees leaders acting in an empathetic way, they will too,” he says.
- Thanking staff: Saying it’s been awful for everybody and you appreciate their efforts to fulfill our commitment to our clients.
- Providing staff with food—one of the fundamental needs of life—allows them to better concentrate on client service and feel like they are being taken care of, too.
One tricky thing, Debus adds, is when front-line insurance professionals get lost in the emotional tangle of the customer’s trauma. “That can be a blessing but it can also be kind of dangerous, especially when you’re trying to manage your own stress,” he says.
“It’s helpful to have managers and supervisors who oversee these groups of employees be mindful of that and be proactive in providing some assistance to these folks because it’s really easy to lose yourself in this process.”
“Trauma is not limited solely to the customers. We know we are there to serve the public. But, our first step is to focus on our staff … .”
—Steven Brown
Head, Personal Risk and
Private Risk Advisors
Acrisure
Debus says additional ways to help staff include:
- Make sure people take breaks and walk away from their desks to reset their energy. And, give them flexible hours in case they need to take care of their own loved ones during the crisis.
- Go home instead of putting in endless hours of work, which increases stress.
- Acknowledge that trauma reactions are normal reactions that every human has to disasters. That makes them easier to talk about and cope better.
- Promote Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) or short-term counseling services.
- Encourage them to talk about their stress with family, friends or a mental health provider.
“Don’t ask people to relive their trauma because that actually causes them to be re-traumatized. You have to walk a very fine line between investigation and re-traumatization.”
—Mark Debus, MSW, LCSW
Clinical Manager, Behavioral Health
Sedgwick
Debus notes that focusing on employee wellness and well-being every day, instead of only during a crisis, can help for future disaster response.
“Employers need to really hammer home the importance of self-care and mental wellness among their employees,” he says. “Anything you can do to help employees manage that stress can be beneficial for retaining them, keeping them happy, and keeping them productive and focused on serving their customers.”
For more information:
Acrisure Private Risk Advisors
acrisurepra.com
meQuilibrium
mequilibrium.com
Sedgwick
sedgwick.com
