How far are we from the day when a major carrier like State Farm Insurance changes its name to StateFarm.com? As a sales distribution channel, that day is still some way off, undoubtedly much to the relief of the people on the business side. But as customers increasingly turn to the Web, its clear company sites have become a powerful service distribution channel that has become a major part of the insurers corporate identity.

I think its an important part of the puzzle, says Bob Reiner, director of enterprise Internet services for State Farm Insurance. Its certainly a different connecting point for the customer, especially for the next generation coming up. It may very well be their first impression of you as a company.

Given that companies cant make a first impression the second time, the Internet is a critical component of a corporate business plan and will grow in importance. As time progresses, says Jamie Bisker, director of research for insurance practices with the TowerGroup, a research and consulting firm located in Needham, Mass., the Web will become easier to use and will enable instant communication between businesses and consumers.

Key to the success of a site is its integration into the enterprise-wide architecture. There has to be synergy, both online and offline, within your company, says Reiner. You better coordinate your online brand with your offline efforts.

A Web site is a touchpoint for consumers and insurance carriers. A good Web site does three things, says Bisker. It provides a way for the company to communicate information to the consumer. It allows the consumer to connect with the company. And it offers service capabilities for both sides.

So where should insurers set their sights when it comes to their sites? Gmez, Inc., is an Internet rating service and consultancy for a variety of industries, including insurance. Three of its highest-rated Web sites in terms of ease of use, customer confidence, on-site resources, and relationship services are State Farm Insurance, John Hancock Financial Services and Progressive Insurance.

Each of their Web sites provides the little things that make them standouts in a world of tangled Web offeringsan agent locator system or multi-lingual capabilities, for example. Youve got to give customers what they want, when they want it, Bisker says. You have to produce a site the way the customer wants to see it. And quality counts. Whatever you promote on your Web site you better be able to provide, Bisker adds. It doesnt do you any good if it is only available sometime.

Insurers and consultants agree there are at least five essential areas to address in producing a topnotch insurance Web site: self service, connectivity, business, security, and information functions.

Self Service

Imagine a representative of your company telling a customer to do it yourself. A decade ago that would have seemed outrageous. Today, if self service is not in an insurers business plan, the company is wasting money. The cost of facilitating routine customer service can be prohibitively expensive, says Greg Davies, senior analyst for financial services with Gmez. How expensive? Compare these numbers: dealing with agents$30 per inquiry; dealing with call centers$12 to $18 per inquiry; dealing with the Internet$1 to $2 per inquiry. Thats pretty much a no-brainer, Davies says.

State Farms Reiner believes that a company can cut expenses with self-help programs on the Web site, but you have to have the infrastructure available to accept and store the data, and that can be expensive. Such moves require a major commitment from the carrier. In terms of the way this industry usually moves, weve gone pretty quickly, Reiner says. It takes a tremendous amount of support from upper management, though.

John Hancock, on the other hand, doesnt allow its life insurance customers to make many policy changes online. We give them the ability to check the value of their investments, says Wendy Benson, second vice president of e-business and retail partnership. She says the goal of John Hancock is to make the Web experience easier and more convenient for the customer.

We have the benefit of a very strong brand, she says. Having a full product suite [available to customers] is important as well, whether they are buying or just gathering information.

Claims processing will be the long-term beneficiary of self service. Starting the claims process is easy to do online, notes Reiner, but real-time claims status is much more complicated because there are multiple businesses and customers involved. Its a little more complicated than someones accounts, he says.

State Farm is getting more initial inquiries about claims, which can speed up the process. We are getting quite a few of the fender-bender type claims online, he says. Those can be filed at the [insureds] leisure. The carrier is not getting many catastrophe claims online because customers still prefer to talk to an agent or a claims rep for those types of claims.

Youll have people who want to do things on their own like set up their checking accounts and do online bill payment as well as make transactions with their policies online, Reiner adds. We think we need to take a synergistic approach to this in the marketplace and meet our customers needs in those arenas.

The first thing a carrier should do, according to Bisker, is review its business cases and decide exactly what it wants to accomplish per the business strategy before leaping headlong into technology. You have to make your company easy to do business with, he says, adding that if customers struggle to navigate your Web site, they arent likely to come back. Capabilities users will appreciate are help tools that answer anticipated questions. Another piece of advice: A carrier should test self-service functionality within its own office first, says Bisker, and then extend it to agents through an extranet before offering it to customers.

The Gmez report, Policyholder Self Service, substantiates that view. Gmez surveyed Web site users for personal auto policies and found that while only 26.8 percent of insured general Web users have visited their carriers or agents Web site, nearly half of them have attempted to use the Internet to access information on their automobile policy or perform customer service tasks. A Web site must be easily navigable, Davies says, because over half of those who were unsuccessful at performing self service say they are unlikely to try again, while successful self service will likely draw people back (74.7 percent).

Carriers are focusing on self service to fulfill a range of customer needs from fully online endorsement requests to the basic e-mail queries.

One concern for carriers is that agents may resist or not appreciate deflecting all those calls to self service. These points of contact might be the only time agents will have a chance to talk to their customers, which is also an opportunity to cross promote other products.

Another issue is awareness. If a company offers self-service functionality, it needs to inform its customers of the process. Most customers dont even know their insurer offers online self service, and those who do perform such functions often discover the feature on their own, according to Davies. Communication is vital, because nearly 25 percent of users surveyed by Gmez believe it easier to phone, fax, or visit an agent to accomplish a task than do it on their own online. The Web sites may be partly to blame for this. Navigating some sites, particularly those with help tools available, is easier than others.

Wheres Waldo? (Or Whatever Your Agents Name Is.)

Most CIOs would prefer to stay out of the debate over the need for agents. But even if your Web site has the capability to underwrite and issue a policy, most of a carriers sales come through agents. Therefore, Web sites need to offer customers a quick and easy way to pursue the human connection.

Davies says the agent-Internet relationship is no love affair. The word Internet is still a bad word for many insurance agents, he explains. Their thought process is that the Internet is one step closer to eliminating them from the process.

State Farms approach is that there are always going to be some people who are going to feel a real value in establishing a relationship with a State Farm agent. That will always be the core of our business, Reiner says. But we also need to be available by phone and Internet on a 24/7 basis.

While agent locators are useful, they need to facilitate more of a connection between the customer and an agent than merely offering a simple address or phone number. The Hartford Financial Services recently developed a system with InfoNow that enables customers to contact the agents immediately and allows the carrier to keep track of the leads (see Case in Point, p. 15).

Were proud of the functionality on our Web site that helps drive business to them, says Toby Alfred, Internet site manager for Progressive, who believes her company is bridging the gap between agents and the companys Web presence. When consumers visit Progressive.com to get a quote, theyre given the contact informationincluding name, address, e-mail address, and a Web site linkfor up to five nearby independent agents.

And consumers want insurance agents, says Alfred. The fact is, many consumers still prefer speaking to someone personally before they purchase, she notes. We think there will always be a demand for this.

But Progressive also knows that many of its customers can do just fine without an agent. We want to provide an option for those consumers who prefer an alternative: The night owl who wants to shop at 3:00 in the morning. Or those folks who just want a quick and easy way to check out coverage options and pricing on their own.

While The Hartford developed its system with the help of a vendor, State Farm was able to build its own locator system on its Web site. We actually built [the agent locator] here and maintain it as well, Reiner says. We brought in some people to help us. We have the portal up and running so that when you register with State Farm you have a portal site, and we have a way of having a dialogue with you through that. It varies across the board. We use different partners for different applications.

Bisker says this and other functions are falling under the heading of Web services (see Evolution, Not Revolution, p. 22), noting, Web services are the logical next step for improving a corporate Web site.

Can I Quote You on This?

Developing a fast and accurate quote system is essential for a carriers Web site because many policies, such as term life and personal auto, have become commodities. That involves collecting data from all over the country (depending on how many states a carrier is licensed in) and spitting it right back out in a matter of seconds.

Reiner says, I think getting integration into the back-end legacythe big ironis always difficult with formatting the data properly and contextualizing the customer experience. Carriers relied on agents to handle inquiries, and now the calls come from anywhere. For so many years, the customers dealt with agents and claims reps, and now more of the organization is dealing directly with the customer through the Internet, he adds. Data has to be presented in a certain manner, a certain focus, and a certain look and feel. Its all very complex, and were lucky to have some really good people here who understand that.

Were piloting new functionality that allows consumers to get a Progressive quote right off the agents Web site, Alfred says. The consumers contact information is then sent to the agent in the form of sales leads.

The Internet has significantly affected the purchase habits of American consumers. One in five adult online users utilized the Internet the last time they were in a purchase mode for insurance to support their decision, according to Gmez.

I think the tools are out there today, Reiner says. We built our own in-house quoting function here in conjunction with one of our strategic partners. I think there is software available now and programs available for the smaller businesses where they can replicate some of the things that have been done by the bigger organizations. Its a little simpler now than it was back in 1996 or 1997 when we first got involved with these things.

Many people in the industry are surprised that online aggregators such as InsWeb are still in business, but Davies believes the aggregators are giving customers what they wantquotes. People want rate quotes, and if you cant deliver them, they will go somewhere else, he says. The competition for carriers comes from the carriers themselves, not the aggregators. They still offer an alternative for customers, but the impact is less acute.

How Secure Are We?

With all the data being collected by insurers on their customers, keeping it private and secure is not only good businessits the law. In terms of how Progressive approaches the issue, integrity is one of our companys core values, and security is very important to us, Alfred says. We use state-of-the-art secured socket layer (SSL) technology to ensure security of our customers information. Beyond that, we protect our customers privacy and how we handle and store the information.

Progressive wouldnt disclose its security measures, but Alfred says, Considering the state of technology today and whats available to companies to protect this information, I would say we are doing all we reasonably can to protect the security of our customers and our Web site.

State Farm uses cookies to facilitate site navigation and to provide additional security. It also uses the most recent release of SSL technology utilizing encryption of up to 128 bits to ensure the safety of the data transmitted to the Web site.

Reiner believes it is valuable to have your Web site checked periodically, for both content and security problems. Whats been really helpful to us is to have evaluations of our Web site done by a non-biased, third-party arbiter, he says. Its nice to have them come in and give you an objective, critical analysis of your Web site. We try to do that every year, and while sometimes its surprising, sometimes its reinforcing. I recommend it on a consistent basis.

Information

Fresh content can make the difference between an active Web site and one that is waiting for someone to click on. Its an integrated effort between the business and the systems area, Reiner says. These days, things are moving so fast and you have to be fluid, flexible, and able to adapt. Having outside partnerships and strategic alliances helps you do that. Our systems department allows us to integrate, and thats not an easy thing to do in an organization our size. Weve done it fairly effectively in a short amount of time, which is also another shift in the paradigm because ordinarily things dont move that quickly in an organization this size, and we have moved fairly quickly.

One area of information that State Farm and some others have worked on is communicating with the huge Spanish-speaking population in this country by translating its Web site into Spanish. It sounds simple enough, but State Farm found it was technically challenging, according to Reiner. There are different dialects of Spanish spoken by the various Spanish-speaking people who have emigrated to this country. For instance, Mexican-Americans in California or Texas speak a different dialect than immigrants from Cuba or any of the island nations of the Caribbean.

We wanted to find a baseline Spanish translation that would satisfy our Spanish-speaking customers without offending any of them, he says. It took several months to translate it because there were some insurance terms that just dont translate well.

French will be the next language tackled, he says. State Farm does a lot of business in French-speaking areas of Canada, and Reiner notes, the company felt it important to recognize what many businesses fail to acknowledge: Many people think of Canada as an extra state, but of course its not, Reiner says. Recognizing those differences assists State Farm from a global perspective, as well. Future insurance dealings are less likely to be structured around one country or one state, and the need to think globally will be a priority, according to Reiner.

Progressive is also aware that English is a second language for many of its customers. Customers can search our Web site for agents who provide special servicessuch as proficiency in a foreign language, says Alfred.

Progressive believes its name is indicative of the way it does business. Our goal is to continually enhance the site to meet the growing demands of consumers, Alfred says. Weve been an innovator in the insurance industry.

Whats It All About?

Change occurs quickly in business, but the speed of change brought on by the Internet is staggering. You just cant blink or take a nap or youll miss it, Reiner says. You always have to be skating to where you think the pucks going to be. Bisker adds, The Internet is an important component now, and as time progresses, the Web will become easier to use and enable instant communication between customers and carriers.

So while the Internet may not have changed the way we do business now, insurers agree were not done yet. Six years ago, insurance Web sites were almost primitive when compared with todays, according to Reiner. In six more years the same thing could happen.

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