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.

So I checked it out.. the PR suggested that I could compare quotes for business insurance across multiple insurers for all types of cover - key man, general liability etc etc.

On the site it’s easy to find the business insurance section, and as promised big friendly buttons point me to the class of business I want. BUT.. all 12 buttons take me to the same form with the same questions to answer…

…clearly, this is not a quoting site, just a name and number grabber to ship off to highest bidders.

The problem with this type of thing is the consumer - they’re much more savvy that sites like this believe them to be.

If you’re going to offer the promise of a quote, you need to at least ask the questions they would expect to hear - remember, they’ve probably already got insurance before, if they don’t get asked a reasonable subset of the questions they expect then at the very best they’re going to think you’re not doing your job very well.

There are upsides for you too with clean, well organised data:

Faster handling of enquiries
Less re-keying
Easier analytics and M.I.

Don’t be one of the many broker sites promising a quote with a form that asks for a name, address and telephone number and that’s it… prospects don’t buy it!

“In recent years we have seen a growing trend of people taking out life, critical illness and income protection insurance over the phone and online, especially via intermediaries. This latest ABI initiative will help ensure that the UK uses world-class online and telephone processes to help people disclose all the relevant information about their medical history. This will help ensure that people who take out cover in this way can rely on their policy to pay out when the need arises.” ~ Nick Starling, ABI Director of General Insurance and Health

Link: www.abi.org.uk

It also hilights a few of the challenges facing the industry - including more sophisticated consumers and online purchasing.

The outlook?

We forecast relatively modest growth in the UK insurance market between 2007 and 2011. Although significant increases in premium income were seen in 2005 and 2006, this level of growth is unlikely to be sustained. The industry is expected to witness further consolidation and the growing presence of foreign insurers.

Link: http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c66977

Call Connections in Ipswich will be managing the venture coming online early next year, after they get the personal lines site out the way.

As we’ve said before.. watch this space…

Tesco already offer business financial services in the form of SME Credit Card offers at every checkout and are well versed in Internet…

By virtue of the fact they know everything we read, Amazon’s database could make a pretty accurate stab at which user is a likely target for commercial lines insurance (or personal lines.. “People who bought Trans-Atlantic Yachting for Beginners also found this ad interesting…”)

I think we’ll also begin to see smaller niche aggregators come along, but not for a while - there are technical issues to overcome of course, notably the complexity of rating guides that are too small (in market size) to be considered economically viable for larger software houses to invest in (or brokers).

Quotiva pricing is published - you’ll know exactly what a project will cost before you start.

The system is paid for on a monthly basis, and is on a thirty day contract, so you can cancel, swap providers or even just experiment as you need to.

Basic Pricing

The monthly fee is a function of the number of classes of business (’engines’) you put on the system (e.g. Taxis, Classic Cars, Motor Trade would be three), how many schemes you have per class of business (e.g. if you have Chaucer and HSBC rates for taxis, that would be two schemes), and how many leads you get in a month.

Your first engine costs £225 per month, additional engines are £125 per month thereafter for up to 20 schemes per engine.  Thus, if you have 2 engines with three schemes each, your fixed monthly price will be £225+£125.

There is a pay-as-you-go element, but it doesn’t kick in until you reach a certain level of usage, which not all brokers do (we’ll be more than happy to explain all our pricing, just give us a call).

Initial setup costs are nominal, and are based on the complexity of the risk profile question set that you need to produce a quotation.  We’ll prepare a capped price for you based on your rating guides detailing everything so we all know what needs to be done and what the budget is.

At Quotiva we believe your data should be yours to do with as you wish, so we don’t erect any barriers to stop you getting it out the system.

You can download as much or as little of it on demand right from your Quotiva administration system in a standard, non proprietary format ready to import, analyse or do with as you please. No extra charges of any kind.

Integration with other systems

If you want us to create a connector or export format to move your data directly from Quotiva into a third party system, that’s quite easy too. All we need to know is the specification and your software provider should normally be able to provide documentation or assistance to do that.

Tiered user management

Quotiva allows for unlimited users on a single installation, there’s no per seat charges.  You are in complete control of your users and what they can and can’t access.

From your control panel it’s simple to create new user access, and even have granular control of which engines, rating guides and breakdowns they can see.

It’s also possible to group users by Company and Office - adding “Companies” to your installation is a way of distributing rates through a sub-agency or partner network, in effect giving them “mini” Quotiva’s of their own - but giving you a wider distribution channel and even more M.I. to feed to the analysts.

Security

With any Internet connected system there will always be a risk of unwanted data access, anyone who told you otherwise would be lying. We understand that though and take numerous measures to secure your data, both in our systems, hardware and software. The weakest point will be your own choice of usernames and passwords - so choose wisely!

The physical facilities where Quotiva installations reside are Class A IDCs chosen for their redundancy (they have things like three diesel generators in a chain - you only need one in case of power outage, but sticking two more on gives you double redundancy on your redundancy!), superb connectivity and skilled technical staff on site 24/7.

Full backups of everything happen once every 24 hours, stored on remote media.

All servers are behind hardware firewalls and access restricted to strictly limited locations. Physical access is impossible without clearing security or using heavy weaponry.

In that age old battle between sales people (”Where are the good leads?!”) and marketing people (”We’re getting the leads, where are the sales?!”) quick, clear M.I. is the only judge.

Because Quotiva automatically and unobtrusively gathers information from prospects, salespeople, marketing sources and more it can produce a wealth of data for you.

At the simplest level, it’s a snip to see just how your inbound sales enquiries are being dealt with - leads are colour coded on arrival and by sales staff to indicate their progression through the sales pipeline - one quick look at the “leads” screen shows you in an instant what’s going on.

Daily, monthly, weekly and yearly sales snapshot

The system produces a snapshot PDF report on demand consisting of two sheets with all the pertinant information you need. Leads, sales, commissions, closures, wins, losses, P.I. etc broken out for the last 7 days, 4 weeks and 12 months. Combined with a simple analysis of lead sources, areas of strength and weakness it can make interesting reading to alongside your accounting financial insurance software. Add custom reporting rows and you might find a few things you didn’t know about (one client discovered half his new business enquiries were for a profile that none of his insurers handled - so he used the Quotiva data to negotiate new rates).

QSEI & PSEI - business intelligence software for insurance

Just for (serious) fun, we employed a mathematician to create a very special equasion which, if you’re allocating leads to salespeople, will statistically rank each member of you team based not only on commission income, but performance in relation to the team (above or below average), in relation to the volume and quality of leads they were supplied, number of closures and more. It’s an interesting snapshot to use alongside your more traditional measures of performance and can hilight issues and performers in new ways.

Quotiva dashboard

Some things look better in pictures. The Quotiva dashboard(s) give you an instant graphical view of performance and K.P.I.s. You can see in a glance the relationship between web traffic and sales enquiries, the visits / leads / sales funnel, quotes to no quotes and more.

And of course, as with all things Quotiva, we can customise dashboards any way you like to produce the report you really need.

Data Mapping

Quotiva will even produce colour coded maps on the UK showing where you where your leads are coming from and where you’re winning business. Once you start to generate leads online there’s no reason business should be restricted to local areas.

There is little point creating more leads for yourself if you can’t follow up. So, Quotiva comes with its own standalone CRM system ready to help your sales team work through the database quickly.

The CRM has loads of features to play with if you want them, most of which developed at the request of users so there’s no fluff. Here’s a few:

Instant access insurance agency sales tracking software

Leads go straight into the Broker CRM. You aren’t required to run a report, import a file or any other IT-ness, the second the prospect pushes the button then that lead is in your database - quoted, profiled and ready to call.

Full prospect data

You’ve saved on keying an entry (your prospect entered their own data) and you have every piece of information you could need. Full postcode address lookup has gone on in the background to save the prospect time and give you accurate address information. You have each element of their risk laid out in front of you clearly on a single screen and can extend information as you wish adding notes, pipeline status, even doing Acorn Profiling to find out loads of socio-demographic information about the postcode this person lives / works in. This is CRM for SME at its most efficient.

Live quotes

In addition to the client’s previous quote, insurer and system generated quote, you also see on the same page all of your current carriers and what they would quote for this risk with the rates as at today - each one broken down line by line with reasons for declension or referral included.

Requote

Sometimes clients type the wrong information into a web form - no matter, you can send the lead to the Quick Calculator and requote it on the spot.

Search, filter, organise

Quotiva installations end up with tens of thousands of new business leads, so being able to search and organise efficiently with your crm software system is important.  Quotiva includes all the tools you need to manage your agency leads.

Allocate to account executives

Leads can be automatically or manually allocated to members of your team. That way sales staff can sort and filter on their own pipeline and M.I. can be easily generated showing who is achieving, departmental scoreboards etc. No need for specialist financial insurance accounting software.

Pipeline customisation

Each engine can be customised (by you) to colour code leads with all kinds of different statuses - you might want to mark leads as essential for follow up in orange, timewasters in grey or whatever suits your system.

CRM software UK

Quotiva is specifically for UK insurance brokers - postcodes, not zipcodes..

SMS

In the race to get back to clients, it’s often useful to be able to send them an SMS text message to their phone - you can do that with a single click from the lead detail page with any custom message or template that you choose. You can even set the “from” field to be whatever you want - a number to reply to or an alphanumeric version of your company name.

The core quotation systems are powered by our proprietary Quotiva Decoder System (QDS). With it, we can very quickly translate any rating guide to a usable rating engine, literally “teaching” the quoting process to Quotiva as you would a new underwriter.

We don’t force providers to create complex formats of their guides for us, we don’t need to, Quotiva handles just about any schedule “out the box”. It works just as well as specialist auto insurance quote software as it does for the smallest niches.

There are three places the QDS is called upon:

Live Customer Quotes

These are the quotes on your public facing website.

A prospect will complete a risk profile form, designed with usability in mind, and submit their details to your system. Any mistakes they make that we can detect are corrected or prompted at the point of submission.

Behind the scenes, Quotiva will calculate the best rate from any number of insurers, normally in under a second or two, and present a custom page to your prospect. You can show the best price, details about the “winning” policy, which salesperson will be acting as account executive and so on. All the information is custom to your installation - you’re not forced into a set format.

Live CRM Quotes

Inside your administration section you have access to all the leads sent to you and can view any item in detail. Along with each lead is displayed a complete breakdown of the current risk quoted (or declined) across all your carriers with detailed line by line explanations of calculations.

The Quick Calculator

For accessing your rates quickly, or distributing rates to sub-agents, partners, testers etc, you will use the Quick Calculator built into Quotiva. This is essentially a split screen window with all rating factors on the left and calculated premiums / calculation detail on the right.

Using the Quick Calculator is for the most part point and click, selecting ranges and ticking boxes, so that calculating across all your guides takes literally seconds. Unlike more complex systems, you don’t need to jump through many administrative hoops before you can use the Quick Calculator which means you can work extremely fast - from login you are 1 click away from your rate form.

Updates & adjustments

One of the great things about Quotiva is its ease of update.

Most changes we can implement the same day, we don’t need months of advance warning. New rates go onto the system in advance for automatic triggering at a specific date and time in the future. It doesn’t matter if databases and structures have changed - the QDS takes it all in its stride.