Mastering Stakeholder Satisfaction in Travel Insurance Projects

Stakeholders are individuals who are vested in projects such as insurance projects. They will be willing to know how your insurance project is progressing. These updates will be about delivery time and if your project is within its budget. Project managers have to manage the expectations of their stakeholders.

Stakeholders’ expectations are the standard by which a stakeholder will consider the project a success. They are often a combination of things. These may include the delivery of the final service or product meeting the quality expectations. They are usually set up by the stakeholders and also include finishing the project within the budget and on time.

Manage Stakeholder Expectations in Travel Insurance Project

Here are some of the basic steps you should follow to manage stakeholder expectations in a travel insurance project.

Identify Your Stakeholder

According to Joe Cronin, President of International Citizens Insurance, “managing stakeholder relationships is to identify who they are and what they need from your travel insurance business. You can use different tools and strategies to map out your stakeholders. These tools may include stakeholder analysis, stakeholder register, or power-interest matrix. Using these tools, you can understand the interests, goals, needs, and concerns of your stakeholders. Furthermore, it will also allow you to understand their level of involvement and influence in your travel insurance business. Identifying your stakeholders will allow you to find any potential goals, conflicts, or overlaps. When you know these factors, you can plan how to address them.”

Prioritize Your Stakeholders

According to Rudy Bush, Founder at Wiringgerman, “Prioritize them based on their urgency and importance for your insurance business. You cannot treat all your stakeholders equally. This is because some may have more impact or want more attention than others. You can use different standards to rank your stakeholders. These criteria may be their interest, power, risks, dependencies, and expectations. Prioritize your stakeholders and allocate your efforts and resources efficiently. Focus on the ones that you think matter the most for your insurance business.”

Engage Your Stakeholders

“Engage your stakeholders in a constructive and meaningful way. You can use different channels and methods to interact and communicate with your stakeholders. You can engage them in meetings, newsletters, social media, surveys, or feedback forms. The key is to shape your engagement and communication strategy to match the preferences and needs of each stakeholder group,” says Alex Taylor, Head of Marketing at CrownTV. Moreover, it helps to establish consistent and clear messages and expectations. When you engage with your stakeholders, you can build trust and loyalty. This helps in fostering innovation and collaboration.

Monitor Your Stakeholders

Managing stakeholder expectations is to monitor them systematically and regularly. You can use different indicators and tools to measure and track performance and stakeholder satisfaction. These may include key performance indicators (KPI), stakeholder feedback, or balanced scorecard. These tools can allow you to evaluate the effectiveness of your stakeholder management strategy. Furthermore, they can identify any gaps, issues, or opportunities for improvement. Monitor your stakeholder and ensure that you are exceeding or meeting their expectations. Make sure you can adapt to any challenges or changes in the environment.

Tips for Effective Stakeholder Expectations Management

If you want to manage your stakeholder expectations effectively, here are some tips.

Document the Stakeholder

Many times, when an insurance project begins, there are various people within the organization who try to give feedback and request changes to the project plan. These individuals may be your client members, vendor partners, and team members. You should know that not everyone is a stakeholder. Quite often, all companies that are influenced by the project have stakeholders represented on the project. The members of the change monitor these things. However, they have a representative that they can go to and answer for their organization, so not everyone is necessarily a stakeholder.

Enforce Process

“It is important for a project manager to align the processes so other people in the organization can let them know that there is a change management process. These people can be a team member or your project manager. So, if there is any feedback on the insurance project or decisions that need to be made, it must go through a formal change management process,” says Kartik Ahuja, Marketing Manager at LegalOn

Provide Regular and Frequent Status Reports

Stakeholders often have several projects going on. That is why they attend many meetings and have various tasks. They are looking at a lot of project reports and trying to make decisions. The project manager must keep things managed, documented, and delivered. Hence, it is essential to provide frequent and regular status reports. Moreover, make sure these reports are in the format that is feasible for your stakeholders. Remember that executives need a different level of status than the team members. Your team members may need more detail on their project. However, executives may require in-depth details on the overall health and status of the insurance project.

Ask Questions

Make sure to touch base on a regular basis and ask questions of your stakeholders. Communicate with them and ask what they think about the project. You can also ask if the insurance project is meeting their expectations. When you ask these questions, you can have their concerns they may have ahead of time. You do not want to know the drawbacks or concerns in an executive meeting. That is why you always remain updated with any feedback so that your final product fulfills the stakeholder’s expectations.

Conclusion

Managing stakeholder expectations in an insurance project can be challenging and risky. For example, you may have to deal with a diverse range of stakeholders with different perspectives, interests, values, and backgrounds. Because of this diversity, it can be difficult to satisfy their expectations and needs. Moreover, uncertainties and changes in the external and internal environment may influence the behavior of your stakeholders. It may require you to adjust your stakeholder management strategy as well. Plus, if you have disputes with your stakeholders, it may damage your relationship and reputation. So, in order to avoid all these challenges and risks, following effective strategies is a better idea. Make sure to do your research so that you follow the best practices and avoid as many risks as possible.