How to help clients cope with the inevitability of death

Death is a difficult subject. Although death is the most guaranteed eventuality of our time here on earth, it’s uncomfortable to discuss it, and therefore, people avoid it.

As an insurance or retirement planning professional, you’re no stranger to the topic of death. Especially for those of you in the life insurance space, death is a matter you deal with far more frequently than your peers in other industries. But instead of seeing this as a burden, I see it as an opportunity for you to provide comprehensive support to your clients.

I’m an after loss professional. I work with people who are grieving a loss to help them navigate the roadblocks and red tape that inevitably emerge upon the death of a loved one. Working in the insurance space, you’ve likely walked clients through some of the challenges I see regularly — things such as identifying the beneficiary of a policy, tracking down companies that no longer exist or long-retired brokers, or helping a beneficiary figure out what they’re going to do with the payout.

I won’t waste your time telling you what you already know. What you might not realize, however, is that this is just the tip of the iceberg of what your grieving client is dealing with. As frustrating as this experience can be, that client who just received a life insurance death benefit likely has 100 more hoops to jump through to settle their loved one’s estate.

Estimates vary on how long it takes to settle an estate, but I’ve seen everything from around 400 hours on the low end to upwards of 1,200 hours. Not only does much of this work have to be done during working hours, but it’s also done in the deep fog of grief. Studies show that even the sharpest people can become incapacitated by grief. These grieving people — who are likely your clients, friends and neighbors — need more help and more support than they’re getting. My company, PALS (Professionals of After Loss Services), seeks to change that.

Why dealing with death is crucial to clients

PALS teaches professionals in loss-adjacent industries how they can streamline processes for their clients who are grieving a loss. As an insurance or retirement planning professional, you’re already supporting people who are working through the demands of estate administration — why not take that a little further? The benefit to your business goes beyond altruism. The benefits of becoming an after loss professional in the insurance and estate planning space include:

• Enhanced client retention. One of the biggest challenges of estate administration is the disparate nature of all the moving parts. Rather than referring your client to another service provider, being positioned as an after loss service professional enables you to keep more of your client’s needs in-house.
• A new referral mechanism. A little empathy goes a long way. When a service provider goes out of their way to make a client’s life easier, they’re going to tell people about it. Offering after loss services is a great way to set your business apart and demonstrate a deeper level of care and customer service to existing and prospective clients.
• An opportunity to get ahead of a growing need. You may have heard of the silver tsunami, which refers to the wave of baby boomers aging into retirement and beyond. The tsunami analogy is no joke: Baby boomers outnumber the silent generation that came before them by roughly 25 million. Generation X and millennials are having children later in life, meaning most don’t have time to dedicate to estate settlement. These generations are accustomed to using services to streamline processes, and they will look for services like these when their aging parents and other loved ones die.

Anytime my co-founders or I tell someone what we do for a living, we’re always met with: “That’s genius. I wish I’d known about this when my <fill in the blank> passed away.” It’s my hope that alongside professionals like you, we can make after loss services the norm.

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Jasmine Hathaway is a co-founder of PALS (Professionals of After Loss Services). Contact her at [email protected].