Insurance and the Internet
The Internet has revolutionized the traditional insurance industry which once relied heavily on a large staff and network of agents to sell and service policies. There was a time in the industry when everything depended on paper streams passing through many different hands to achieve results. Now that this is no longer necessary-how does that affect you, the consumer?
The Internet’s Effect on Insurance
New technology has allowed many of those clumsy, old paper processes to be automated thereby improving efficiency, timeliness of responses and costs. Of course now, the new problem is in finding a personable approach to a highly impersonal process. While insurance agents use online social networking to get clients and insurance companies do the same, each is struggling to find the right amount of personality to add to their conversations in order to set them apart from the crowd.
One way insurance companies are attempting to improve customer relations and become more personable is by offering customer service and support services through e-mail and chat programs. So while clients are encouraged to access the company’s online system to check on their accounts, they still offer a personal, albeit technical, touch.
The Internet’s Effect on Customers
Customers have also taken to the internet to research insurance companies and shop around for information on premiums and the quality of service offered by each insurer. Since insurance quotes were originally given by insurance agents who had contracts with multiple companies, this represents a great change that empowers the consumer. One of the ways in which insurance companies used to keep their customers was to make it difficult to find out what their comparative premiums were. Since all the companies were less than transparent, the effort in shopping around and ferreting out information encouraged customer “loyalty.” This business model is now broken. Almost all insurers and many agents now run online systems to give ballpark insurance quotes. Some sites, like InsuranceHits.com offer the added benefit of collecting and displaying the comparative insurance quotes for many companies in just one visit. Customers can sit at their PCs and quickly find out what the range of premiums is across multiple carriers.
In addition, quotes are quickly becoming more and more individually tailored; as more customers come online, more personal data can be collected about them and their insurance needs. The additional information is useful to the actuaries who calculate the risks. With the claims process automated, it also allows companies to track loss trends in real time and to continuously adjust premium pricing to maintain profitability. This is a significant improvement on the old paper-driven system.
August 6, 2008
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Tags: companies, customers, insurance, insurance agents, insurance companies, insurance quotes, premiums
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