In certain fields, professionals periodically update their look to maintain a youthful image and demonstrate that they're in step with the times. Physical appearance and perceived hipness may not be de rigeur in the insurance industry, but even a 135-year-old can benefit from an occasional makeover. For instance, although Hagedorn & Co. is stronger than ever and still growing, the agency's managers decided a few years ago to freshen up a bit with an attention-grabbing new Web site designed to highlight our best features. The results? Fabulous!
Hagedorn & Co. was founded in 1869 by banker Henry Bohlen Hagedorn and former sea captain John Miles Gillespie. The two entrepreneurs identified and capitalized upon a niche created by the booming cotton industry of post-Civil War America. They began writing marine insurance that covered crops as they were harvested, processed and carried by ships to ports in the industrial centers of New England and Europe. Later they expanded their underwriting to include the transport of coffee, tea, cocoa, food, household goods and general merchandise.
Today, we employ 55 people and offer a variety of financial products and services, including personal- and commercial-lines insurance, life and health products, financial planning, and global risk financing and consulting services. We write about 5,000 accounts, including several universities and hospitals, that generate almost $80 million in annual volume.
I came onboard in 1995 and for the first four years worked primarily on IT and networking projects. I wanted to try my hand at Web design and development, so I took several classes at the School of Visual Arts here in New York City and taught myself ASP and JavaScript. In 1998 I persuaded the agency's managers that we needed a Web site and set out to create one from scratch with a small budget and a Web
I also asked the delegates, based on their interaction with clients and prospects, to suggest features that would best benefit visitors to the site. (We would have welcomed feedback from people who had visited our original site, but no one had submitted comments on the form provided.)
For the new Web site, we again used DreamWeaver, along with Flash, a Microsoft SQL database and ASP, a programming language that integrates HTML pages with the database. All the site's content now is entered into the database. If someone wants to add an article or revise a page, they give me the new text and I copy it into the database. The software creates a link to the new material and displays the page for me to view. Once I've approved it, the software automatically updates the content without altering the design. We use a cascading style sheet (CSS) file to apply formatting to page titles, headings and fonts. I like this design method because it separates content from page design, making it easy to change the appearance of the entire site just by changing the CSS file. Kate and I experimented with several designs and settled on a simple gray-and-white scheme with splashes of blue and orange. We punched up the visual appeal with colorful photographic images on the main pages and smaller versions as bullets for the subheadings on subsequent pages.
Putting a face with the name
The site's features include a brief overview of our agency and its history, profiles of our principals, client testimonials, a PDF of our agency brochure that can be downloaded or printed, links to articles about the agency that have appeared in industry publications, the names of companies we represent and links to their sites, links to insurance-related Internet resources, articles from our newsletters, and FAQs. The "What do you need?" page provides coverage checklists, calculators, quote forms, a guide to reading and understanding an insurance policy, and several insurance-themed articles for laypeople.
The site's structure makes navigation quick and easy. The four main sections are labeled "Who We Are," "What We Offer," "Client Resources" and "Client Login/Claims." Drilling down from any of these main pages is simple and hierarchical. For example, clicking on "What We Offer" yields a list of products and services. A visitor who selects "Personal Insurance" is presented with seven options, including a list of personal-lines products, an offer of a free policy review, FAQs and an e-mail shortcut to our personal-lines manager. Click on "Automobile Insurance" and you get a concise overview of the coverage provided by a basic auto policy, followed by a brief paragraph describing some optional coverages. On the right side of the page, we ask, "Need more information about automobile insurance?" and provide a "Contact us" button. (We sprinkled those generously throughout the site.)
Visitors can download or print several commonly used forms. One example is a PDF of the MV104 form used to report motor vehicle accidents that occur in New York state. Visitors can print the form, then mail it or fax it to the Accident Records Bureau. We list the bureau's mailing address, as well as contact information for a person on our staff qualified to answer questions about claims involving motor vehicle accidents, along with an e-mail shortcut so visitors need only to enter their names, e-mail addresses and questions, and click on the "submit" button. We provide similar forms for filing D&O claims. We've also posted a list of personal-lines, commercial-lines and marine insurance carriers, their telephone numbers and hyperlinks to the claim-reporting pages of their Web sites.
Our Web site gives clients online account access. Clients can request user IDs and passwords that allow them to view their contact information, policies, deductibles, premium amounts, and descriptions of their covered vehicles and other covered property. Insureds also can change their addresses and phone numbers or add new vehicles they've just purchased. Some insurance companies' Web sites offer portals for insureds to view their policies, so they could bypass us and go directly to the carriers' sites. At our site, though, they can access all of their policies in one place–and make changes once-rather than logging onto and navigating through several different sites. Also, they may find that a company's site refers them back to us, so they save time and effort by coming to our site first. We post a disclaimer, however, stating that insured-initiated changes are effective only when confirmed by someone from our office.
From the beginning, I advocated online access but faced some resistance. Our agents feared that insureds would give their user IDs and passwords to competing agents, who would then use the data to underbid us and pilfer our accounts. Also, our CSRs were not comfortable with the notion of insureds changing their contact information independently or printing their own certificates of insurance. They worried that clients might enter inaccurate information and that our staff would be held responsible. For now, the feature that would allow insureds to print their own certificates is disabled, but I hope one day to restore it and demonstrate how much time it can save the CSRs.
Another feature of which I am especially proud is our bimonthly online newsletter. Visitors can subscribe to it simply by entering their e-mail address. A marketing agency supplies us with text files of the articles, which we copy and paste into our database, then customize to match the site's format. The articles succinctly speak to a variety of topics, such as workers compensation insurance, professional liability, crime coverage, construction issues and risk management. If we offer a related product, we include a link to a page that describes it. At the end of each article is an invitation to e-mail the article to a colleague or to contact our staff for more information about the product, service or risk-management technique mentioned.
Creating a buzz
Once the rebuilding was complete, we began promoting the site. We asked all our department managers for the e-mail addresses of their customers, prospects and underwriters, and sent them notices. We asked companies and vendors with whom we do business to list our agency and its URL and insert a hyperlink to it. (We noticed that other agencies often were listed on carriers' sites, but few of those listings had hyperlinks, and some of the links that did exist led to pages with outdated information.) Insurance companies helped us with marketing and sent us referrals obtained through their networks. We also put our URL on our agents' business cards, employees' e-mail signatures, materials we present to clients and prospects, and ads we place in industry publications.
We track how much traffic the Web site receives and whether people log on directly to our site or are directed to us by a hyperlink on a carrier's site. The results are encouraging. During May, June and July, the site recorded 38,000 hits. We averaged 89 visitors per day, and the average number of hits or clicks per visitor was 12. Between April 1 and July 31, the newsletter was accessed 900 times by 600 different visitors. Our brochure has been downloaded 150 times.
The cost of creating and maintaining the Web site has been fairly small, considering the amount of revenue resulting from the leads it has generated. The software package that included DreamWeaver and Flash cost $900, and an upgrade we purchased later cost $400. We pay $250 per month for an online integration module that downloads active account information every night, $400 per year in hosting fees and $900 annually for the newsletter articles. Since redesigning the site, we have written more than 30 new accounts directly attributable to it, yielding $110,000 in premiums and $25,000 in commissions.
Our Web site demonstrates that even an agency more than 100 years old can remain au current. Like our founders, we know the importance of keeping pace with trends in the insurance industry and in the world at large. We also embrace technology and use it to better serve our clients. These are two of our secrets to longevity and, frankly, we've never looked better.
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