Blog

Imagine that you visited your doctor tomorrow for advice and discovered that she hadn’t updated her knowledge or skills since she qualified 20 years ago.  How confident would you feel about taking her advice?

The GROW model is a fantastic way of agreeing and setting a course of action. Great for the development of others as well as yourself, it provides a logical step-by-step structure that you can agree and commit to.

Following some recent meetings with the FCA, there are a couple of pieces of information to share.

Our daily interactions are something we take for granted and probably manage at a subconscious level. We are constantly interacting with different stimuli, whether it is in our daily conversations, when watching TV, in the classroom, gaming, working on our computers or visiting a shop. Pretty much everything we do includes a form of interaction.

Who has heard of the PSC? I hadn’t until yet another email popped up on my screen.

Different professional bodies will have different requirements but fundamentally, it’s agreed that there are two types: structured and unstructured.

As children we have an innate love of stories and many of us take that love into adulthood as we choose the escapism of a good book or movie to fill our free time. Through these stories we have subliminally learnt lessons such as, never trust the advice of a man in difficulties; appearances can be deceptive; a liar will never be believed; and there’s always someone worse off than yourself. Of course all these examples come from Aesop’s Fables but when deconstructing any story you will always find a message and you will also realise that somehow you’ve uncovered and understood that message.

Another initiative where Aviva has been involved is the Meeting Recorder app, developed by consultancy firm RWA and funded by the insurer. Tom Wood, director at RWA Business Consultancy, explains that the app allows brokers to create a record of when they have been to see a client, using their GPS. They can also add notes on what has been said in the meeting. “So if there is a claim they can say they have evidence that they went to see the client on that day and show a copy of the notes they made,” he says, adding that a copy of the record can also be sent to the client.

At a recent meeting with the FCA’s General Insurance Sector Supervision team, the subject of advised versus non advised sales came up.