Insurers Still Poor On Web Privacy, Survey Says

CRG researchers visit, analyze and rate Web sites on a 10-point scale based on six criteria: simplicity, responsiveness, transparency, principles, attitude and privacy. According to a CRG representative, George Cohen, the criteria were developed by surveying "thousands of Web users" on what was important to them when they visit a site.

This year's good news, in a survey for the first quarter, is that among 34 property-casualty and life-health carriers, the number of insurers that failed to respond to online inquiries "fell dramatically from 36 percent to 19 percent," CRG said.

Last year the researchers found that among all industries, on average, 26 percent of the sites contacted did not respond.

The researchers found that, compared with a survey last year, insurer sites replying within an hour rose from 12 percent to 14 percent, but the number that answered within a day fell from 67 percent to 54 percent.

According to CRG, the drop in one-day replies may be partly explained by the fact that companies might have put systems in place but are not equipped yet to respond in a timely fashion.

On the privacy front, CRG said there was "little good news" and that carriers share user-submitted online data with business partners at "an alarming rate."

Compared with the all-industry 24 percent average for sharing such data with third parties, CRG said the figure for insurers is 35 percent–a one-point increase over last year. According to CRG findings, 70 percent of Web users will not supply data to a site if they are not comfortable with its privacy policy.

CRG said 50 percent of the firms "have no obvious way for customers to choose to opt out of future marketing use of their information."

The researchers listed as a negative trend the fact that companies are presenting "heavy" homepages, with only 9 percent at below 77 kilobytes. They also noted that only 12 percent of sites have easily resizable text.

Overall, the insurers' CRG Customer Respect Index rating was a 6.1 compared to 5.9 for all industries. Progressive scored the best in the industry with a 7.8, followed by Nationwide at 7.5. CRG rated Mercury General lowest with a CRI of 3.8.

Examining Web sites for simplicity, CRG found insurers had on average a 7.7 CRI–slightly better than the overall industry CRI of 7.3. Property-casualty insurers rated a 7.8 average CRI, compared with a life and health simplicity CRI of 7.6.