3 ways to achieve telematics success

Dating back to the founding of the Equitable Life Assurance Society in London by James Dodson in 1762, the insurance industry has used data to improve outcomes and reduce risk in their decision-making process. Over the centuries, the evolving discipline of actuarial science has used data to create the complex models that our industry relies on to create and refine sophisticated insurance products and services. The pencil and paper that Dodson and his colleagues in 18^thCentury England used to make their calculations back then could not compile and analyze the petabytes and exabytes of data that is done today, yet we have been slow to translate these valuable bits and bytes of data into our decision-making process.

Today, in the early days of the 21^st Century, there’s just no excuse for business decisions that are not supported by persuasive mobility data – especially in insurance, of all places.  Now, in full disclosure, I’m very biased.  I am a data person.  As a little girl, I carried around notebooks full of stats that I tracked around the house (such as those dials on the electric meter, the length of anything I could line up against my wooden ruler and the weight of anything that fit on a scale).

Find yourself a proven partner who has actuarial acumen, credible volumes of data, and financial security.

Charming, right?  Even today I maintain a pretty intense workout routine primarily motivated by the dozens of data points collected from multiple sensors. In fact, my internal data-driven decision-making framework is what drew me to telematics in the first place. By marrying telematics data with human behavior, insurers can make drivers aware of their driving habits and put them in control of their safety.

Mobility data provides opportunities to leverage real insights for customer success and industry innovation. Here are three ways to avoid common telematics pitfalls:

1. Know your customer: With telematics data, you don’t need to guess what your customer wants. Decades of insights can help you foster informed customer relationships. So millions of data points — not your peers or manager — tell you what you need to know about your customers’ questions, concerns, and interests.
2. Pick the right partner: I love this industry.  The people are some of the smartest and kindest that I’ve had the pleasure to meet.  But kindness doesn’t lead to profitable growth.  Find yourself a proven partner who has actuarial acumen, credible volumes of data, and financial security. Yes, I am one of these partners, so of course, I say this and believe Arity brings all of it to the table. But above all, what I would like to see is that once you go through all the work related to deploy this kind of program, you actually, and quickly, achieve success.
3. Just use the data: Good golly, it’s a lot of data!  More than I could have ever imagined when I was filling up my childhood notebooks.  If we use it correctly, we should be able to accurately, precisely price (not swag math or conservative judgmental selections) to accurately and confidently identify that a crash occurred (not “maybe it was a crash” or Candy Crush). This level of accuracy is hard to achieve, but it is very possible. Between the cloud and the enhanced level education that data scientists are entering the work field with, we have a world-class understanding of drivers, their behaviors and their crashes. You can, too.

What we do is not easy. There is a reason we were hired seconds after we got our degrees. The amazing thing is that it’s a great job! But our thinking needs to evolve and we need to use all the tools we have to improve our models and therefore our ability to make better decisions.