Award Applications

Zurich Risk Advisor is a unique application that gives users (Zurich customers and non-customers alike) self service access to risk assessment and prevention tools. The application, available on all platforms, has two components:

What If…?:
Following a risk grading completed by a Zurich Risk Engineer, this module enables users to prioritize their risk improvement actions by testing out the effect of each one on the overall risk grading score.

An easy-to-understand barometer indicates the risk rating, and a simple slider system allows users to define the situation for each risk factor and analyze several areas of prevention, including fire damage, machinery breakdown, business interruption; floods, winds and storms; and product & public liability.

What If…? is educational and practical. Zurich’s insight into each risk factor is available in detailed descriptions of best practices for controls, mitigation techniques, and risk improvement ideas. Links to additional information and resources are also available.

Self Risk Assessment:
This module enables the self assessment of risk through a simple questionnaire of multiple choice questions (each having four answer options). The questionnaire is based on the methodology and recommended practices of Zurich Risk Engineering. Therefore, the application gives site managers and risk managers direct access to Zurich’s knowledge and best practices.

Once the user has completed the questionnaire, they will see their risk rating on a user friendly gauge, as well as detailed results for each risk factor category and recommended improvement actions. All this information is then downloaded as a report in PDF format that summarizes the evaluation and recommended actions.

Innovative Features:
Zurich Risk Advisor has a variety of innovative features:

Accessibility:
It is available via the web from any computer, and can also be used on tablets and smartphones (iOS and Android). Current languages are English, French, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Indonesian.

Design and simplicity:
The two modules are very intuitive. Self Risk Assessment uses a simple questionnaire and visualization of results in the form of a barometer. What If…? uses a simple slider system to enable users to test the implications of a particular change on the final risk grading.

Transparency:
The application shows risk managers an easy-to-understand visualization of the prevention criteria that affects risk grading and risk impact. The Zurich Risk Engineering methodology and insights are fully available in the tool.

Practicality:
The application goes beyond self assessment by giving users concrete recommendations for improvement actions for their loss prevention strategy. All results are easily exportable in PDF format and can be sent by email from the application. Results can also be exported in CSV format for easy aggregation with results from other self-assessments in the organization.

Scalability:
We are planning to add new features to the application. It may soon be connected directly to our customer portal, My Zurich, allowing simple and direct communication with Zurich Risk Engineers about the development of preventive actions. The Self Risk Assessment module, which is available today for fire damage prevention, will soon be extended to other areas and will to include the ability to add site location details, location coordinates, currency, and occupancy, and the ability to add free text notes.

Background and objectives
Risk prevention is a central element of the services that we offer to our customers. With over 75 years’ experience in this area, we have more than 900 Zurich Risk Engineers around the world whose goal is to help our customers protect themselves from risk in order to limit the impact of any losses to their balance sheets and their reputations.

The development of Zurich Risk Advisor meets many customers’ satisfaction goals: transparency of the evaluation criteria used by Zurich Risk Engineers, support for decisions that enable risk managers to prioritize their risk improvement actions by easily visualizing where the impact will be the greatest, and the opportunity to self-evaluate using proven methods.

Benefit for users
Zurich Risk Advisor gives risk managers autonomy and knowledge to assess the risk prevention measures at all their sites around the world through the Self Risk Assessment module. It is an educational and knowledge sharing tool that has practical business application, allowing them to more easily target areas for improvement in their risk prevention policies.

Some customers use Self Risk Assessment to benchmark their production sites and select those at which they wish to undertake a risk visit. Beyond this self-assessment, the application also allows users to see concrete actions that they can implement to improve the quality of their risks.

Additionally, the application allows risk managers to prioritize risk improvement actions by visualizing their effect on the overall risk rating and focusing on the risk factors that have the greatest impact.

Results already obtained
Initially, Zurich Risk Advisor was offered to some of our major international customers, and is already being used by a global customer to benchmark fire prevention at its production sites. This allows the customer to select sites for which a risk visit by a Zurich Engineer is a priority, which enables optimization of the allocated budget and greater efficiency.

Zurich Risk Advisor helps educate users about different aspects of prevention that can be implemented and the impact of those aspects on the quality of risk.

Why do you think that your innovation deserves to be recognized?
All customers to whom we have presented Zurich Risk Advisor are impressed by its ease of use and the practical applications that it has for risk management tasks.

The transparency in sharing our risk engineering expertise combined with the visual, easy-to-use design, truly makes complex, important topics much more accessible to our customers and the risk management community. This can lead to improved safety for their properties and employees, and ultimately the communities they serve.

By making our knowledge and expertise freely available to anyone who uses the web version or downloads the App, we are assuming the risk that our competitors will use our knowledge for their own gain, but we feel that, ultimately, in the bigger picture, risk managers, our customers, and the communities we serve will all benefit.