C-Suite: Prepare for the worst

As insurers or brokers, how often do we suffer the consequences of the things we insure others against? I suspect it’s a fairly rare occurrence. So when it does happen, as it did to us at AIG in the UK recently, it is an opportunity to learn first-hand what some of our customers experience.

We had a fire at our offices in Fenchurch Street. It happened at a weekend and was, thankfully, relatively minor with no injuries. But the resulting damage, particularly from the water used to extinguish the blaze, was significant.

It resulted in complete denial of access to the building for 10 days, but we managed to have more than 95% of our staff working in alternative locations within three days. Now, five weeks after the event, we have occupied 10 of the office’s 14 floors, with nearly 90% of staff back in the building.

We were fortunate for a number of reasons: the fire was contained and extinguished quickly so that the building remained intact and, more importantly, we had well‑rehearsed incident management and business recovery plans, having carried out an exercise in our Croydon office earlier in the year.

The amount of energy and commitment it takes to work through an event like this should not be underestimated. The AIG incident management team worked extremely hard on the primary objective of ensuring we maintained a good service to brokers and customers. It also helped that significant numbers of staff were able to work from home.

Equally important was the determination and professionalism shown by our staff in maintaining the momentum we have built up over the past two years.

Crisis management should be integral to any business operation. Larger organisations have business continuity managers. Smaller companies, however, may not have such a dedicated resource, so planning for such events, and rehearsing and updating plans, is arguably more crucial if the business hopes to be resilient enough to survive.

One statistic that is often bandied about is that more than 75% of companies that experience a serious fire go out of business, either directly as a result of the fire or within three years of re-opening.

But how many of those firms had a robust and well-rehearsed plan to deal with such a situation, or had the support from partners that we enjoyed? I am very grateful for ours.

The biggest compliment I received from a key broker was that he had not noticed any deterioration in our service levels – this shows that our plans and our people delivered.

Nicolas Aubert, managing director, AIG

This article was published in the 17 October 2013 edition of Post magazine