Lessons from Saga’s motor quote comparison site
SAGA have launched a car insurance comparison site specifically targeted at the over 50s called Confident Cover.
Research amongst nearly 16,000 people aged over 50 on the Saga-Populus Panel shows that almost seven in 10 over 50s (69 percent) have visited an online aggregator to research car insurance. However less than half (44 percent) have actually bought a policy in this way. The reason why people appear happy to check prices but less keen to buy appears to be because sites don’t give people enough information.
There are some interesting observations that come from the research for this that can be put to good use for brokers.
It turns out that 83 percent of people thought that comparison websites focussed only on the lowest quote rather than the policy details, and 79 percent didn’t find clarity in what the cover included - courtesy cars, driving other cars and so on.
Obviously coming from Saga, this data points to older and perhaps less price sensitive / once bitten surfers - perhaps you don’t really care about feature X’s availabilty until you’ve had experience of it not being available to you…
A further 79 percent said they would find it more useful to have proper policy and price details on 20 or so policies from recognised insurers, than limited information from several hundred companies.
Why don’t we start to build insurance comparison software that searches policy features more deeply instead of focussing just on rating factors alone:
Almost half (43 percent) of those questioned agreed strongly that generic online comparison sites were useful to determine headline prices, but they would rather call the insurance companies directly so they know what is and what isn’t included in the overall price.
Online completion isn’t everything it seems… As we see all the time with Quotiva brokers, clients are happy to get prices online and close offline, particularly where the broker is able to differentiate one policy against another effectively without resorting to price alone.
