CII Kent Conference round up

This was my first time at the CII Kent Conference and I was really looking forward to listening to all the guest speakers throughout the day. One of the first speakers of the day was Adam Beckett, MD of Private Clients and Product & Proposition Director for Aviva and his talk was the one that I found the most surprising, it helped me understand how times are changing, and fast. He used powerful examples of changes that we will start to see and showed the importance of how we must start preparing now for what will be in years to come to ensure that we move successfully with the times.

Other talks throughout the day included; Phil Eckersley, a representative from the Bank of England, Kent’s Police and Crime Commissioner Matthew Scott, Steve Carrington from Ocuair Limited who explained everything there is to know about drones and Sarah Moore from Poole Re who discussed how new age terrorism requires new age solutions.

The last talk of the day was given by Richard Mullender, a Former Hostage Negotiator who’s aim of the conference was to explain how to get information without asking questions, listen with heightened awareness, know what to listen for and to interpret the true significance of what’s being said. This talk I found the most impactful and it was the one that has resonated with me as I write this.

Looking back on Richard’s talk, The Importance of Listening, it was really interesting to understand how vital listening actually is. Our sub conscious does a lot of listening for us and so it can be very easy to hear what we want, or expect to hear, rather than it actually being said, when we converse with someone. Richard explained that there are some great techniques that can be used to understand what someone is saying to you and understanding what is important to them. I think using these listening techniques will be extremely useful as a company in order for us to understand what it is our customers actually want. We can use these tools in everyday scenarios, from speaking to customers, brokers, colleagues and even friends or family to help become better communicators and getting to the root cause of what matters.  From there we should then be able to appropriately respond to them in order to get the information that we will need to be able to help.

I’m glad I attended my first CII conference, it was really informative and covered a whole host of different topics and I’d recommend it to anyone who’s thinking of attending next year.

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