On the 'hot or not' list of technology for brokerages, chatbots don't fare well

The number of techy tools that brokers have access to in their toolbox is growing as broker management systems include more and more features, technology vendors offer solutions that allow for the analysis of data coming in from carriers, and insurers plan out brokerage environments of the future that are focused on the customer experience. Not all technology will prove to be useful to brokers, at least not at the outset when these tools are still being honed, and some will fail to be adopted widely – one only has to look at Segways to realize that technology is not always as transformative as it promises. In the case of one brokerage, chatbots were that tech tool that didn't quite take off. "We were one of the brokerages experimenting with chatbots and we never really got to a point where it was there for us to go all in on them," said John McClelland, broker and director of digital for McClelland Insurance, and founder of miBroker, adding that it wasn't a complete enough solution. While the firm's experiments involved using chatbots for lead generation, the next piece of the puzzle was missing.