Carol RozwellOne of the people I had breakfast with during the Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit was from the insurance industry. His organization, like many insurers, depends on a network of agents to sell their policies. For many years, they have focused on making it easy for an agent to write a policy so they would be the preferred company to do business with. They also depended upon the agents to know what kind of products their customers want.
Lately, they have been experimenting with a process that gives them feedback on what actual customers want rather than relying on the agents to translate the customers’ needs for them. Not surprisingly, they found that the agents view of the customers’ product needs and the needs expressed directly by customers are different. Using social tools has given them a means to hear the actual voice of the customer (VoC).
I’m told by my Gartner colleagues who cover the insurance industry that most insurers do not know their customers. They think that their competitive advantage is their brand and their broker network. But a survey documented in Kimberly Harris-Ferrante’s research indicates that in the customers’ eyes, the cost of the policy is the major thing they care about (see Kimberly’s report U.S. Insurance Consumers 2010: Social, Complex, Online and Evolving).
The major take-away for me from that conversation was that every organization needs to find the true VoC. Social media monitoring tools offer one way to collect information from the social web that could be helpful in determining current and future needs. Innovation management tools offer a more focused approach for gaining insight from a known constituency. The best practice is to be willing to continually ask questions.
Category: Collaboration Knowledge management Social media social software Uncategorized Tags: Collaboration, Innovation, PPM-Summit-EMEA, social software
2 responses so far ↓
1 Patrick Moult April 12, 2011 at 4:02 pm
I think this is changing, certainly in Australia, where personal insurance lines are purchased directly with the insurance company; home, motor, travel etc. Where the product is compulsory and government has a strong control over procing e.g. worker’s compensation and third party motor, the insurer want to know more about the risk e.g. size, location, probability and history, than the customer needs, since it is the former that allows the company to chose good business make money.
Also, we should not forget that, in many cases, the insurance company is selling capacity and the the customer often does actually belong to the broker, not the insurance company. This is why insurance companies strive to make it easy for brokers to access their sales and claim data and sell their products.
What insurance companies are not good at is setting eCommerce standards for the industry. While it may be easy for a broker to communicate with an insurance company’s systems, a broker often has to log on to each insurance company in turn, to get a competitive quote. This takes time, and the broker will often pick just a few to quote from. There are sumilar issues across states with injury and other codes.
Insurance companies need to realise that new technology does not provide a sustainable advantage. They need to work together as an industry and create standards that will not give the competitive advantage to the few, but to all.
2 Carol Rozwell April 13, 2011 at 6:16 am
Thanks, Patrick, for your thoughtful comments. It’s good to hear another perspective.
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