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First Quarter 2010 Life Insurance Trends

Insurance websites gain maturity to become integral to the business

Ipswich 28 January 2010

The Customer Respect Group, an international research and consulting firm that focuses on how corporations treat and respect their online customers, today released findings from its latest review of leading companies in the insurance industry.

The objective was to measure trends and innovations as the industry enhances its online presence. During the past 12 months, there has been significant investment in the online channel as websites migrate from information repositories to be an integral part of the customer experience.

The key trends and developments found in 2009 were:

• Integration of the company website as a critical component of customer pre-sales research
  • The addition of quote engines, task-orientated documents and policy comparison tools allows prospects to delve much deeper into the research process
• A greater focus on collecting and supplying leads for the agent
  • While prospects are looking to research deeper into the process, there continues to be a strong desire to close business in person or over the telephone. The transition from the web to agents is becoming smoother
• Greater support for customers to self-serve and manage their existing policies and accounts
  • Customers increasingly want to review, manage and change policy information online without calling the company. These facilities are improving and becoming more prominent
• Development of microsites focused at specific demographic groups
  • Specific demographic groups are being targeted with focused content, addressing their needs in their language

There are other early trends, which while so far have not gained significant traction are attracting consideration attention:

• Early-stage exploration of the role of social media in customer engagement and marketing
  • Social media is in the exploratory stages especially for marketing, brand protection and early stages of lead referral programs
• Initial applications aimed at the mobile user with specific applications for smartphones (especially the iPhone)
  • Mobile web traffic is on the increase and insurers are putting their toes in the water looking at specific reduced-functionality applications. Most focus is aimed at smartphone adoption for downloadable apps or for updating websites for smart phone compatibility
• Critical task identification
  • Websites now contain huge amounts of content which has made navigation harder for the most critical tasks. Streamlining and critical task identification have become more prevelant as part of the integration of websites into attracting and maintaining business

The leading Life insurance companies evaluated were Western & Southern Life, MetLife and Thrivent Financial, with Progressive leading the Auto Insurance companies.

According to Terry Golesworthy, president of The Customer Respect Group, “Websites are now much more critical to insurers, and whereas previously the objective was to simply get the customer to contact an agent, it is now becoming more important to give customers control over the process”