Gerontology Drawn Into Executive Suite
Employees at Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Connecticut spent a day in someone else’s shoes--and they were filled with rocks.
The rocks simulated bunions in an exercise a gerontologist designed to make the insurer’s staff more sensitive to aging customers. Participants in the one-day training session also donned rubber gloves to get the feel of arthritis and wore glasses smeared with Vaseline to see what cataracts are like.
“It’s amazing what some of them go through,” said Holly Baxter, 35, a program veteran who works in the insurer’s telephone customer service.
“The training makes you more aware of the problems older people face every day,” Baxter said. “You have to have more compassion for them.”
Last year, Blue Cross asked Muriel Banquer of the Consultation Center in New Haven, a consulting firm that specializes in gerontology, to educate employees like Baxter, who field questions from the insurer’s 200,000 older policyholders.
Such training marks a budding trend among employers, from insurers to utilities, like Florida Power & Light in Miami, who are recognizing the need to cater to a growing market of older Americans.
In 1990, people over 65 were 12.5% of the U.S. population, said Richard Besdein, head of marketing strategies for the University of Connecticut’s Travelers Center on Aging.
By 2000, that rate will double and the number of people past 65 will reach 75 million--one in every five Americans, he said.
Gerontologists say it’s only a matter of time before service companies as well as manufacturers start regularly targeting older consumers with products tailored for their particular needs.
“There is a vacuum and it has to be filled somehow,” said Tom Blank, director of social and behavioral studies at the Travelers Center. “Corporate America is the place that’s going to fill it, because it’s worth their while,” he said. “There’s a profit to be made there.”
Georgina I. Lucas, a gerontologist hired nine years ago by the Travelers Insurance Co. in Hartford said that “historically, older people were seen as frail and needing a lot of health care.”
“But they are probably the most active and the most affluent segment of society, so there has been a change in attitude in this country,” she said.
Lucas designed long-term health insurance for people past 65 and trains insurance agents to sell it to them. Her workload was so great, she hired a second gerontologist three years ago.
ITT Hartford Insurance Group brought gerontologist Beverly Hynes-Grace on board in 1986 to train employees who sell home and auto insurance to the 33 million members of the American Assn. of Retired People.
Hynes-Grace even guides the company’s ad designers in their use of lighting and color for the older market.
“Aging is a multidimensional thing--not just physical, but sociological and psychological,” Hynes-Grace said. “People who are not informed about aging will draw their own conclusions.” And that only leads to more unprofitable stereotypes, she said.
