Tower Hill Insurance Drives Workforce Innovation with the Talespin Platform

Written by:

Talespin Team

The insurance sector is currently facing critical challenges in their workforce. With a shortage of insurance professionals, there is a focus to attract, retain, upskill and reskill new and tenured employees. Exceptional customer experience and trust are the foundation of the industry, and many of these customer interactions are becoming automated, or augmented by technology. These trends are causing a shift in the way insurance employees work, and the skills they need to do their jobs.

To offer customers the best possible service and support, insurance companies need to ensure their workforce has the skills and confidence to deliver positive customer experiences. When workforce innovation is an organizational priority, the impacts are felt by customers, employees, the organization, and beyond.

Reimagining Workforce Transformation at Tower Hill Insurance

With these challenges and goals in mind, Tower Hill Insurance, a premier residential property insurance organization, has taken a vested interest in developing new and tenured employees.

Historically, in-person training has been at the core of Tower Hill Insurance’s learning and development initiatives. The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, remote work trends, and the logistical costs of classroom learning have made this training methodology challenging. In search of innovative solutions for upskilling and reskilling their team members, Tower Hill Insurance adopted immersive learning to transform its learning and development practices.

Insurance Training Powered by Immersive Learning Content

Both hard skills and soft skills are a necessity for insurance professionals to succeed in their job roles. Just like doctors and nurses need a balance of procedural skills to deliver patient care, and soft skills to provide bedside manner, insurance professionals require a multifaceted skill set in order to be effective.

For example, a core understanding of insurance claims procedures is vital to guiding customers through the claims process effectively, while soft skills like active listening, building rapport and problem solving are essential to ensure customers feel supported and well informed during their interactions with insurance professionals.

To prepare employees for these customer interactions, Talespin’s off-the-shelf content library provided an easy-to-adopt solution to quickly and efficiently deliver training to Tower Hill Insurance employees across the country. The content distributed to the cohort of learners covered key insurance-specific hard skill learning modules, and leadership training experiences focused on soft skills.

The Talespin LiveOps team supported Tower Hill Insurance’s learning and development team to deploy VR training to remote learners, ensuring they had access to learning content. Tower Hill Insurance employees were able to safely and quickly develop their skills using immersive technology from the comfort of their homes.

“Immersive learning provided an opportunity for us to easily deliver effective training content to our learners, regardless of their location. The Talespin team and platform allowed for simple on-boarding, with advanced insights into training content and learner performance to influence learning and development needs.” - Steven Gregory, Vice President Claims at Tower Hill Insurance

Hard Skills Training for Insurance Professionals

To develop a core understanding of the processes and nomenclature involved in insurance claims, Tower Hill Insurance employees practiced with learning content like ‘Residential Fundamentals’ and ‘Residential Damage at First Notice of Loss’. These modules present learners with realistic scenarios in VR where they must identify residential building materials, assess damaged materials, and engage in simulated customer conversations about claims.

Practicing Critical Soft Skills in VR

While hard skills continue to be core to people’s job roles, leadership and communication skills, or soft skills, are just as critical for employees across industries, and insurance is no exception. To help their employees practice the conversational skills needed for interactions with customers and colleagues, Tower Hill Insurance adopted leadership training modules from Talespin’s off-the-shelf content library.

Learners completed learning experiences like 'Leading Through Uncertainty' and 'Effective Feedback' to develop key leadership skills such as active listening, other awareness, and problem solving. These learning modules enabled employees to practice difficult conversations in a safe learning environment, as they engaged in learning simulations with virtual human characters.

“You speak to the character in VR and although you are reading a script with the best answer, saying the appropriate response aloud helped me mentally remember better approaches to resolving difficult scenarios.” - Tower Hill Insurance employee

Immersive Learning Outcomes

Cost Effective Learning

While new technology can come at a high cost for organizations to implement into their business, immersive learning technology is proving to be more cost effective at scale. Removing the need to fly coaches to various locations, or requiring learners to congregate in one location, Tower Hill Insurance took advantage of these cost savings across their learning and development program.

“We’re proud to have Tower Hill Insurance as a Talespin customer, and to see the positive impact our learning content and platform is having for their learning and development practices.” - Stephen Fromkin, Co-Founder and Chief Content Officer, Talespin

Scalable Remote Training Deployment

The Talespin Platform enabled Tower Hill Insurance’s learning and development team to easily assign training content to their dispersed learners. Using the Talespin Dashboard, learners are assigned content that can be accessed through the Talespin App on VR or desktop devices. The simple logistics allowed the entire initiative to get up-and-running quickly in a distributed work environment.

Distraction-Free Learning Experiences

“Having the VR headset on really eliminates all the other tons of distractions competing for my attention and allows me to focus on my development.” - Tower Hill Insurance Employee

The immersive nature of virtual reality eliminates common distractions such as email notifications, or environmental surroundings. VR-learners are less distracted than e-learners or classroom learners, increasing the effectiveness of learning content.

Measurable Skills Data

Learning modules deployed with the Talespin Platform offer learners real-time scoring and feedback on skills development, and give learning and development teams the ability to track learners’ skills progression over time. The L&D team at Tower Hill Insurance was able to understand how learners performed in individual learning modules, track module completion, and review aggregate skills analytics to understand how different skill sets were being developed across their workforce. This type of skills data helps to inform talent development programs, identifying strengths, and opportunities for growth and progression.

Looking Ahead

The insurance sector has benefited from existing learning libraries in the past. Talespin’s off-the-shelf content library provided Tower Hill Insurance with an easy-to-adopt solution to power skills development and an introduction into the world of immersive technology. The advanced insights that Tower Hill Insurance gained into their organizational practices, workforce skills gaps, and industry needs, allows them to be well-equipped to design learning and development programs moving forward; including the power to author their own immersive learning experiences to complement off-the-shelf content.

Where innovation is playing a key role within Tower Hill Insurance’s business operations, immersive learning will continue to power their learning and development initiatives as they adapt to ever changing workforce needs. The Talespin Platform will continue to be utilized to power skills development at Tower Hill Insurance, expanding into different departments in the coming year.

Stay tuned for future updates on the Talespin blog. We are always looking for ways to better support our user community, and your input can help us transform the future of work together.