Are carriers going to embrace Web 2.0 technology to live in the same electronic universe as their customers? Not if external connection using social networking, blogs, or wikis is the technology under consideration, asserts Matt Josefowicz, director of the insurance practice at Novarica. However, a survey of insurers done by the research firm shows there is plenty of interest and value in the technology for internal purposes.
"In the consumer-facing stuff, there really isn't a lot going on," says Josefowicz. "People are taking tentative steps, maybe putting up a blog as part of a marketing plan or a customer engagement strategy. They aren't delivering any quantifiable results."
By contrast, there is a widespread use of Web 2.0 tools internally, observes Josefowicz, along with a tremendous use of AJAX as a programming methodology for interface. "It reminds me so much of the way the industry was looking at the Internet in the late '90s when there was all this hype around direct sales to consumers taking over everything and putting [agents] out of business," he says.
What pundits in that era didn't recognize was the impact the Web was having on the ability of insurers to interact with their agents, and Josefowicz sees the same thing happening again. "There's a lot of hype around all of the consumer-facing Web 2.0 stuff, and it is having no impact yet, but what's being missed is the internal uses and the communication capabilities both inside companies and between companies and their agents," he says.
AJAX technology is being used to design better user interfaces, reports Josefowicz. Over the last decade, many insurers moved to a browser-based interface and away from the client/server interface. Browser-based interfaces have a number of advantages in terms of being easy to maintain and control, he adds, but even with ASP pages and other browser-based technology, users have been limited in terms of what they could do with page load times and other such issues. "With AJAX, there is a lot more capability to make those browser-based interfaces more powerful," he says.
"The AJAX usage isn't terribly surprising," contends Josefowicz. "It's a new way to program applications for a browser, and the insurance industry is committed to a browser-based interface, so of course it is jumping on AJAX. Wikis and blogs are delivering real value in terms of allowing teams to collaborate to share knowledge and best practices internally."
It shouldn't come as a surprise insurers are gaining more value from blogging as an internal tool. "What people forget about blogging is that's what it originally was invented for," Josefowicz points out. "It was designed as a team collaboration tool. It wasn't designed for publication to the general Internet. The threaded comments and the time-stamped posts are designed for small-group collaboration and communication."
Its value will increase as insurers find their teams more geographically dispersed. "The ability to keep them in close touch with each other and learn from each other through Web 2.0 technologies rather than relying on them to do it face to face is important," notes Josefowicz.
As the work force changes and telecommuting gets more established, Josefowicz believes it won't be just younger workers who will be interested in the Web 2.0 capabilities. "With older workers getting closer to retirement, it will be easier to retain them if they can have some flexibility in their schedule or in their number of hours per week," he says.
Carriers need to keep a close eye on the technology, but Josefowicz doesn't see the day when carriers will appoint a vice president of Web 2.0. "Certainly within marketing departments, it will become a component of online customer outreach and understanding the impact on other people's lives," he says. "Insurers just need to know this is a good tool if they have a team that needs to collaborate, or if they have a need to build applications, there are a lot of possibilities to do composite applications."
Using Web 2.0 technology internally will enable insurance carriers to become more comfortable with the technology, which could lead, eventually, to more external uses.
"Using blogs and wikis and social networking externally is challenging when you don't have a like-minded group of people who all have the same motivations, but internal use will be a first step to gaining a better understanding of what it would mean to use it externally," concludes Josefowicz.
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