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We saw two emerging trends in Indonesia during the pandemic: awareness of insurance and health, and instability of jobs which leads to a gig economy. Both trends have created a unique condition where some individuals seek insurance coverage, while others aspire to become insurance agents. Indonesian insurance agents also face challenges in educating potential clients about insurance and overcoming prejudice stemming from false claims or misaligned expectations. We heard that agent’s general pain points are related to how they are able to deal with constant rejections, gaining motivation and pursuing their clients. Sequis decided to work with JAR and conduct the research to know more about what other challenges the agents are facing on the field, and what can Sequis do to support them.
In order to gain a comprehensive understanding of Sequis’ agents, we want to uncover deeper insights into their behaviors and practices. Through this exploratory research, we aim to closely examine and analyze the specific details of an agent’s daily activities. Our area of explorations consist of four aspects: motivation, social, experience and knowledge. By doing so, we can identify critical areas where we can develop solutions to improve their sales performance and productivity.
We conducted qualitative research to understand agents’ activity and challenges through in-depth interviews. We curated the respondent list provided by Sequis based on the criteria for this research:
It is important to note that our respondents were collected from the list provided by the Sequis team, for team leaders and agents across different agencies in the Jakarta region. After that, we did the interviews in 90 minute sessions.
In our research, we explored our respondent’s motivation and reason to be an insurance agent, their day-to-day activity as an agent, their social support and understanding agent’s know-how in sales production activity. We wanted to understand what are the challenges faced to these agents, daily pain points and how they are able to overcome the rejections. We also gathered success stories from the agents, and discovered what are the important things to learn when approaching their clients.dents.
Based on our findings, we uncovered the challenges agents face at different stages of their journey. We successfully mapped out the development path of agents, from their initial steps in becoming insurance agents to their current positions. We identified the factors that influence their successes and setbacks, and what drives their progression to the next level. Our research revealed that know-how and motivation are key factors in agents’ advancement throughout their journey.
We observed interesting behavioral patterns among our respondents and distinguished the characteristics of experienced agents from newer ones. We found that the challenges faced by newer agents differ from those of experienced agents or team leaders. For instance, newer agents struggle with handling rejections, while experienced agents face challenges in team management. By exploring factors like motivation, knowledge, social support, and experience, we were able to map out specific problem areas for each group.
Upon analyzing the gathered insights and identifying the challenges, we helped formulate recommendations to support Sequis partner agents in addressing these key issues. We mapped out the solutions across various areas of exploration, including motivation, social support, experience, and knowledge, considering their respective impacts. Recognizing that experienced agents and newer agents face distinct challenges in different areas, we prioritized the implementation of solutions based on urgency and relevance to effectively tackle these problems.
The outcome from this research is we have identified the needed support for agents in order to reach their potential clients better or improve know-how as an agent. We suggested recommendations for solutions and helped to prioritize the actions. By completing this research, we were able to help Sequis develop supporting tools for agent’s journeys of sales production, in order to face major challenges and pain points.
