Are Self-Serve Quotes on Your Agency Web Site For You?

In Utopia, prospective clients would come to your agency web site, quote their own coverage needs, purchase their policy on line and you would pocket full commission. In hell, you would have to cold call for all your new business, take all rating information by hand, enter information in individual company raters; when policies get purchased you would have to finish entry of rating and underwriting information in an insurance company policy system. The reality today is somewhere in between but it is easy to understand why, in the quest for Utopia, we want to make it possible for customers and prospects to get quotes on our agency web site.

A number of vendors and companies support on line, real-time quoting but the multiple options available are not the same. Neither is the philosophy and target market of your agency the same as every other agency. Before you select a vendor or company to deliver quotes on your web site, here are some things to consider.

• Are the premiums accurate? This one seems obvious and something most of us would check out up front. But periodic checks will be necessary as companies change rates, underwriting and rating factors. If the web site engine is the same as the one used in house or if the consumer is rating directly with the insurance carrier this bit of due diligence will be easier.
  
  
• What is your agency philosophy regarding your price-service value mix? Some on line raters don't rate on line – on purpose. They load captured information in a rating system and notify the agent that a quote request is ready. This allows agents to de-commoditize what otherwise might be a pure price comparison by introducing advice and guidance. Over and over again we have agents tell us that customers who show up with a cheaper premium via an on line rate quotes almost always unwittingly end up with less coverage. The same thing can happen to people quoting on your web site. If your intent is simply to provide a 'ball park' quote maybe unguided rate comparisons are OK. But it's something to think about.
  
  
• Is your agency ready to deal with 'internet' customers? We have said it before in these pages: internet quote requests do not have a shelf life. If you aren't prepared to follow up quickly, whether to provide a final quote or just make contact, you likely will not convert the request to a policy. Turn around times for internet sourced business should be monitored in terms of minutes or hours, not business days.
  
  
• Will the quote option take consumers away from your agency (web site)? Comparative and company rating is usually a third party, web service application. Information capture and rating are frequently done on the vendor or company web site. Will it be obvious to the consumer what they need to do to get back to your web site? If not, additional business opportunities may be lost and the value proposition promoted by your web site may be missed (i.e., the non-price portion of your value proposition). In some cases, the consumer may end up on a web site where they can quote and purchase products directly that otherwise could be provided by your agency.
  
  
• Who will be getting quotes? Do you want to provide what-if capability to current customers who may be shopping for a car or to whom you are proposing they place all, instead of just some, of their insurance with your agency? Or will your web site rating function be a purely new customer sales tool? Those are different objectives and may require different rating capabilities.
  
  
• How 'user friendly' is the quote interface? When you evaluate the screens and entry fields provided by a vendor you need to step out of your agent's skin. That can be hard to do. You are probably better off getting someone you know, who does not work in insurance, to go through the rater while you watch and take notes. Did they understand the coverage information they were inputting? Was there on screen guidance when terms or selections were unclear? Did the screen flow make sense and did they move through the application at a pace that seemed about right or did they become frustrated?
  
  
• How many people will really use the capability? If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? Put another way, if you have rating capability on your web site but get no visitors, is that rating capability really benefiting anyone? You will be paying some amount of money for the rating capability and it will need to be used a certain number of times to validate the expense. Do you get satisfactory web site traffic now? If not, what will you do to get people to your web site and make them aware of your rating capability?
  

There are some other considerations but we hope sorting through this short list should help you decide whether you want to provide rating capability on your web site. It should also make evaluating vendor alternatives a little easier when you do decide to take that step to add direct consumer rating to your web site.

Web Relevance, Part V – Your Privacy Statement

(Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV)

Financial businesses that are required to have a privacy policy are also required to send a statement of that policy to customers once a year. If your insurance agency has a web site, that privacy policy should also be available there. If it is, sending your privacy statement out can be as easy, painless and inexpensive as a few mouse clicks. Emails with links back to your web site privacy statement can be quickly sent large numbers of customers without the attendant expense of printing, postage and handling. If your agency hasn't put a program in place to capture customer email addresses and begin communicating with them through that medium this one benefit alone will justify the small extra effort of getting those addresses.