Jared Seyl Farmers Insurance: How Climate Change Affects Insurance

Jared Seyl, Farmers Insurance district manager for Denver, has vast experience with insuring properties against all sorts of natural disasters. He has worked with companies and individuals that were affected by incidents such as the 2013 Colorado floods, the ice storms of early 2017, and the 2011 Colorado earthquake. While Colorado normally experiences blizzards each winter, their frequency and severity have escalated in recent years, with a March 2019 “bomb cyclone” leaving thousands stranded and without electricity.

Scientists generally agree that these patterns of extreme weather, ranging from long droughts and heat waves reaching up to 110 degrees to crippling snowstorms, are the result of climate range. Jared Seyl and Farmers Insurance have made it a point to educate homeowners and other property owners of the increased risks associated with these shifting weather trends. Because the likelihood of being affected by a blizzard is higher in Colorado than in other areas, insurance rates there tend to be a bit higher.

In addition, Jared Seyl and Farmers Insurance are looking at climate change as one of their core business issues. They realize that the old business model of using annually-adjusted risk models that use historical data might not be the best way to deal with unpredictable weather patterns. Instead, forward-looking insurers are now utilizing climatologists, statisticians, and Big Data practitioners to constantly update their risk models.

As the planet keeps getting warmer, Jared Seyl and Farmers Insurance expect insurance premiums to continue climbing up unless concrete progress is made towards reversing the global climate change trend. For its part, Farmers’ parent company has decided to divest from equity holdings in companies that mine coal or use it to generate power and to lower carbon emissions and energy consumption by at least 20 percent – proof that the insurance industry should lead the way in reducing the effects of climate change.

Jared Seyl Farmers Insurance: Busy Work and How Farmers is Working to Reduce It

In the field of insurance, employees are expected to work hard, sometimes staying at the office late into the night. However, people who do it too often don’t impress Jared Seyl. In fact, the Farmers Insurance Denver District manager believes that overtime is something to be avoided unless absolutely necessary. He also thinks that being busy for the sake of being busy doesn’t really add any value at all to one’s work.

Researchers at Columbia University recently found out that busy-ness is generally perceived as a status symbol. For many people, the busier they are, the closer they think they are to greatness. However, being busy by itself does nothing if the work doesn’t have a purpose. For example, when Jared Seyl joined Farmers Insurance, he noticed that people kept stacks of paper on their desks. When he asked one agent about the workload, the agent replied, “Oh, I’m actually done with all of them, but people here don’t like empty desks.” When he asked further, he found out that the agent was actually one of the most efficient in the district, but was afraid to let people know how easy the work seemed for him.

Stories like the one above aren’t unusual to Jared Seyl. Fortunately, Farmers Insurance is working on initiatives to reduce the amount of busy work that people do. Customer service representatives’ call queues have been reduced significantly thanks to chatbots that answer simple queries. This gives them the freedom to take on more complex calls. In addition, customers can now use Alexa to access their policies, among other things. As chatbots take in more calls, they learn more about their callers’ needs, such as the most frequently asked questions and most mentioned search terms.

However, for Jared Seyl and Farmers Insurance, these technologies are not out to take away jobs from humans. Instead, they are designed to make humans’ lives easier through the reduction of busy work.