Part 3: My advice to insurance professionals

So you read the two previous posts and are biting your nails, eagerly awaiting my final word for dealing with millennials. My first piece of advice is to reread the preceding sentence and notice a glaring issue. Does anything strike you as odd?

Dealing.

The best way to deal with millennials is to stop treating us like something that you have to deal with—because that sounds a lot like we’re something to put up with. Just like any other customer-related service, if you approach your clients like they’re a chore, everyone is going to have a bad time. So here are some ways to create a better environment for working with my generation!

Millenials and Health Insurance

Tip No. 1: Drop the script.

Like I said in Part 2, we don’t react well to sales pitches. It’s been widely noted that millennials are markedly unreceptive to typical sales techniques, and I’d contend that this is the cause: we don’t like scripted and impersonal messages. We respond best to decidedly human interactions, so scripted pitches, cheesy slogans, and prepackaged responses will not work with us.

Millenials and Health Insurance

Tip No. 2: Don’t alienate us.

Supported by my age group’s proclivity for social justice, we are particularly sensitive to alienation and condescension. Approach us with the same regard that you do all your clients. I’m not asking for special treatment, just be impartial. Not alienating us also means not placing yourself in a power-position above us. Don’t look at yourself as Professional and me as Uninformed. I understand that the basic idea behind sales and consulting professionally is that you have an expertise that I don’t. But the important thing is that you don’t act like I’m incapable of ever having that expertise. Don’t create an “us vs. them” divide.

Millenials and Health Insurance

Tip No. 3: Give us room to empower ourselves.

Simply put: teach us, don’t lecture us. Explain to me why the marketplace has XY&Z options, instead of just telling me it does and which one I should choose. We don’t want to know that things work, we want to know how they do it. It might seem counterintuitive that the best way to retain millennials’ business is to teach us about your jobs, but we value our independence. If you diminish our ability to grasp things ourselves, we will not come to you for help. If you’re approachable and down-to-earth, we will be back. It’s that simple!

Millenials and Health Insurance

Tip No. 4: Forget what you’ve heard.

Really. Forget it ALL. Well, most of it anyways.

Be dynamic. Probably in a large part due to ever-rising technology and media usage, we are a different breed of consumer than any generation before us. We are bombarded with so many advertisements every single day that we’re kind of immune to them. The techniques that ensure my mother’s patronage basically ensure that you won’t be getting my business.

Millenials and Health Insurance

Okay, so that was a lot of words, and here’s what they’re all getting at:

Be a human and treat us like humans so that we may have a very human interaction.

I consider myself pretty impervious to sales pitches, but I can tell you that if a salesperson (or in this case, insurance professional) gives me the respect that they themselves would want, I am infinitely more likely to be a return customer of theirs and to recommend them to my friends.

Millenials and Health Insurance

So, just relax and remember to be human. That’s it!