The Insurance Annual Review Challange

I  was recently asked if I had any statistics about insurance agencies who performed annual client reviews.  I do (somewhere), but lost interest when I couldn't turn up anything after ten minutes of folder foraging.  But I did run across some stats from which you can reasonably extrapolate the kind of results your insurance agency might get if you performed annual reviews.

• 83% consumers want an annual review – NAIC Survey
  
• 90% want all their insurance in one place – Progressive Survey
  
• 6.8 is the average number of insurance policies per household; most agencies average less than 2 (this includes life, health, disability, an agency should have an interest in these other products that are out there – 

Selling other insurance products, such as life insurance, can actually improve the retention rate of other products the agency sells. A 1998 report... showed that the retention rate of automobile policies improved when the customer purchased more than insurance from the agency.

The retention level improved from 61 percent to 83 percent in policy year five when a customer purchased three or four products from the same agency. The rate improves from 44 percent to 75 percent in year 10 and from 35 percent to 71 percent in year 15.

Yet, the percentage of American households who own multiple lines of insurance from the same agency remains small. Only 6.9 percent of all households have purchased p-c and life insurance products from the same agency, LIMRA reported in that study.  National Underwriter, 2003, Issue #2)

Of course, there are reviews and then there are reviews. The content and positioning of a review questionnaire should follow the objectives the agency has for the activity. I recall visiting a large agency service center a few years ago when they were sending out renewal questionnaires. At the time, the response rate was about 30% - respondents overwhelmingly asked to be re-quoted to see if the agency could get them a reduced premium.   I’m sure someone around there has a bad taste about that still.   There was a problem with the questions the agency used on the questionnaire.  Customers seemed to think there were one of two outcomes:  either the agency was going to sell them more stuff thereby increasing my costs, or they were going to make the agency re-quote my policy to reduce my costs. 

Effective review formats consist of questions to turn up potential gaps that may not be addressed in standard policies.  An online format can be sampled in an Annual Review Wizard from Confluency Solutions (request a review if you want to try it out).  The Wizard asks what has changed and puts the agent in a position to follow up with suggestions to adjust insurance protection for those changes. This format is focused on creating opportunities to discuss other products and capture more policy relationships – a follow up is necessary in a process like this, and an agency needs to know it has capacity for the activity that will be generated.  But a review can be an effective account development and retention tactic.  You just have to have a little faith in my extrapolation...or maybe you have some results of your own you wouldn't mind sharing?

Easy Updates to Your Insurance Agency Blog

An easy way to make sure you update your insurance agency blog is to use RSS feeds to have potential blog content and ideas pushed to you. You can riff on information provided for you, but be sure to put some kind of unique spin on it. What does the information mean to businesses and consumers in your market area? Could you expand on some key points?

If you don't know what an RSS feed is*, you owe it to yourself to check it out. RSS feeds can be quickly and easily set up to 'push' content from most news, blog (and other websites) to a RSS reader of your choice (Google Reader, My Yahoo!, etc.).

One feed you should definitely set up is to the Insurance Information Institute's blog. They post regularly, and often include statistics and study related information that can be effective in your agency blog.

By the way, you can set up an RSS feed to this blog, and if you take the plunge and set up an agency blog, you should definitely encourage others to set up feeds to your insurance agency...

RSS in Plain English*

Blogs in an Insurance Agency Ecosystem

Blogging remains a foreign concept to many insurance agents and many larger businesses as well: only 12% of Fortune 500 Companies are using blogs in their communication mix. But smaller companies have caught on to the business benefits of blogs. A recent estimate put the number of business related blogs at over 850,000. Unless your insurance agency has an active blog (or two), you are missing on an effective and virtually free way to get more customers, quality control information you provide to consumers,and increase website content and generate more site traffic (i.e., even more new customers).

One tool, one tactic, and a multiplicity of benefits. What are you waiting for? The trick is to find a way to take a concept unfamiliar to many insurance agents (blogging) and embed that concept in your agency practices in a way that quickly breeds familiarity.

Here is how a blog might fit into an agency ecosystem:

1. Blog set up with all producers and CSRs with ‘author’ permission (that is, everyone can post to the blog).
2. Your insurance agency web administrator monitors your blog weekly

Scenario:

• Customer calls or emails CSR or producer with a question.
• CSR or producer determines if question is account or customer specific, or applicable to a broad cross section of customers or prospects.
• If the question is account specific, the CSR or producer can answer the question via email or on the phone.
• If the question and answer have broader applicability, the CSR or producer post the Q and A to the agency blog, then email the blog post linkto the customer.
• Agency website admin reviews blog posts weekly; content is edited for accuracy, etc. Some content, with small modifications, can be moved to the agency website as an FAQ or article.

In the above scenario, the blog posts substitute for email content, and they present little extra effort. Responsibility for blog content is distributed across all staff vs. becoming a burden for one person; and by extension, responsibility for website content refresh is also shared. The blog would be a resource first for individual customers and insurance agency staff, and later, a resource for a wider audience, either as blog posts or edited posts migrated to agency website content.

Someone in the agency will have to review content for quality periodically; this is probably not being done now (with emails and phone conversations), and would constitute an additional task. But quality reviews are a good practice for a number of reasons. Using a blog as outlined above makes quality control possible in a way that would be far more difficult to manage with emails and phone conversations alone.

I can see some objections to inserting a blog into daily communications, but all objections will basically boil down to this consideration: Blogs and other Web 2.0 tools are routinely used by other businesses, and growing number of consumers - especially Generation Y. Is your agency willing to adapt to new communication tools to improve agency service and acquire new customers, or are you satisfied with the status quo? If capturing new customers and improving the quantity and quality your agency can deliver for basically no cost are objectives for your agency, then there is really no valid objection to blogging.

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Flesh and Blood and Circuits Revisited

I saw a press release yesterday about Allstate providing mental/visual acuity exercises via software from www.positscience.com. It is geared toward helping older drivers process more visual info – something that deteriorates with age. Interesting, proactive, and forward thinking. In the grand scheme of my script/consultation program, this is a product an agent might suggest, and a conversation to be had when a customer reaches 50 or 60. That’s an age when your driving skills haven’t deteriorated much, but you are completely sober about the reality and inevitability of the decline. Waiting until a customer hits 70 is too late; by then they are in denial. Or maybe you have the conversation with customers who are in their 30’s about their parents.

(note: at the time of the press release, I could not find anything on the allstate website about the service. oops!)

Connecting the Dots: Insurance Agency Service and Technology

I was doing some light research while drafting copy for target market website landing pages, and once again, allowed the internet to pull me into a digressive side alley. So of course I have to drag you all in with me.

The cover article in a periodical widely read by agents and companies, Rough Notes caught my eye. The September, 2008 issue features an agency that is able to provide high levels of service thanks to technology: Technology Backs High-Service Approach at 7-Person Agency.

What is instructive about the article is that all the ‘technology’ referenced in the piece is internally focused: insurance company-to-agency via download and real time rating, internal efficiencies gained going paperless (that can mean several different things, but that is a post for another day). There are a handful of platitudes about ‘service’ in article: ‘customer-focused’, ‘service “through the internet'; ‘Technology has allowed us to communicate with the younger generation…through email’; ‘We’re able to meet with clients more frequently, assist with claims, and provide them with quotes from other companies if that’s what they want’. These are the same kind of general, ‘service’ claims agents have been making since eight seconds before the advent of dust.

My point is not to cast doubt on the featured agency's ability to deliver these service generalities better than other agencies. The point is that too often we assume internally focused technology and efficiencies result in better service. There is an old and well validated axiom: work expands to fill the time available. If we create time through efficiencies, but do not explicitly fill that time with measurable, customer focused activities, the void is often back filled with more internal work.

What caught my eye about the article's title was the juxtaposition of the words 'technology' and 'high-service'. My mind leapt to the assumption that some kind of customer facing technology was at work in the featured agency. That I made the assumption is my problem, but it does raise another point. Technology for pushing data around the agency, or to and from the company, is not technology that consumers care about. Too often I still see agency websites touting a 'state of the art computer system' when all there is to brag about is an agency management system and some kind of comparative rater. That will engender a great big, consumer yawn every time. If a consumer is to care about technology, direct benefits need to be described - that is, here is how you will save time, or here is why your protection will be better. Indirect benefits - we're more efficient so we might be able to spend more time with you - just don't resonate.

There is nothing to suggest that the featured agency is using technology to systematically develop their customers and differentiate their agency. It’s all about saving time, and putting that time savings to work in an ad-hoc way will result in'higher-service' that is inconsistent at best.

I don’t mean to suggest that efficiency is not important; it is a key to profitability and sanity. But having more time is not the same as providing value-added service (which the Rough Notes cover suggests the article is about). That is a point we felt was being missed too often when we conceived Confluency Solutions four years ago, and the point is still being missed, I'm afraid.

Flesh and Blood and Circuits

I have been ruminating lately on a tale of unusual personal service, and have found myself considering the lessons for local, independent agents in a wired world.

I traveled across the country recently, and was able to catch up with an old friend. During my visit, we started swapping stories about kids becoming teenage drivers and he shared with me a service provided by his insurance agent that, more two years after the fact, still engendered a sense of wonderment in the telling.

His agent called dad and lad in for an hour long meeting about the nuts and bolts of liability and driving responsibility. It seems that this particular agent used to counsel the kids solo, but she was so effective that many of the new drivers tossed their keys to their parents on their return home, muttering they weren't ready for the responsibility.

A lot of us think that 'risk management' isn't really part of personal insurance, but this is an example of risk management at its finest. Not only that, the teen driving counseling story has been told countless times to friends, neighbors, co-workers, and... me. Two years later, the story is still going strong. You can't buy word-of mouth referrals like that. And what about the improvement in retention resulting from this kind of service? (For more on that, take a look at the August 2008 National Auto Insurance Study, published by JD Power, and the effect improved loyalty has on price sensitivity. 36 percent of auto insurance customers have actively shopped for a new insurer in the past year - how many of your agency customers actively shopped for a new insurer or agent?)

Too often we are tempted to compete head-to-head with GEICO by providing online quotes, leaving a personal insurance prospect or customer to figure out their own needs, and manage risk on their own. There is nothing wrong with having articles, videos and helpful information on your agency website to help mitigate teen driving accidents. But when those web resources can be combined and promoted along with personal counseling service, a value is created that is unassailable by blandishment of quick quotes and arms-length relationships - even in the face of massive advertising.

Video on Your Insurance Agency Website, Part III

Professional or Amateur?

There’s a lot that can be done with video, and having video production capabilities in the family (the kid with the Mac)gives you options. Clearly there is a place for professionally done video production, as well as a place for (reasonably professional), low/no cost, self-made videos (the 50-something with the digital camera).

In fact, there was a recent news item featuring CNN’s opening of ‘bureaus’ in seven cities where they previously did not have one. Expense is a determining factor in opening and maintaining a network news bureau – equipment, technical personnel, etc. The new CNN bureaus will provide broadcasts via web casts, ‘directed, filmed, and produced’ by the reporter. The vastly reduced cost of that kind of production makes it possible for CNN to provide direct coverage in more areas – an example of how fast and inexpensively produced video can coexist with higher production value programming. In fact, CNN has taken this a step further with their iReport service, where virtually anyone can report news and publish video 'story'.

You have to wonder if there is a 'best' balance between videos that are slick and professional, and videos that are not edited with layered soundtracks. I'm sure there is no one right answer, but I'm going to throw this out there: providing only slick, commercial grade videos may suppress total views. Allstate Insurance has had a YouTube video channel for over two years, and the total views have been somewhat underwhelming at 7,114 (and 4 videos account for nearly 75% of all views). There are 37 videos on the Allstate channel, most have been seen fewer than 200 times. I'm not suggesting that Allstate has not achieved acceptable ROI from its YouTube channel; remember, production and publishing costs should be low. I am suggesting that commercial grade videos may not always be the best way to go on the web, particularly when videos are published to a social site like YouTube.

What does this mean for your insurance agency? Don't be afraid to have employees, customers, and others in the community produce videos for you. Worry less about matching TV quality production values, but focus on quick publication and community relevance. Your video views, and site traffic, should go up.

Web 2.0 and a Blast from the Slow to Adapt Past

In the earlier days of the internet, companies big and small limited access to the web to a few key employees and frequently did not provide email addresses. That reflex to restrict was born of a combination of two things: the clarity with which businesses recognized potential employee abuse of web surfing and non-business emailing coupled with the inability to grasp the advantage of quickly gathering information and communicating instantly using the same tools.

Most businesses learned how to manage concerns about productivity and resource drains, and employees now routinely use the web and email. In fact, particularly as web services begin to replace networked or desk top office suite applications, most of us couldn't conduct business at all without web access.

We're seeing a similar reaction from businesses, particularly larger ones, in response to Web 2.0. Facebook, YouTube, and other social networking apps are switched to the always on position at home for employees in their 20's and 30's, but are locked down in the off position at work. But change is taking place, just as it took place in the 90's with email and web use in general; check out this article from IT Week.

YouTube is often Web 2.0 non grata. Of course band-width is an issue; a bunch of employees watching videos via the web simultaneously could bring internet browsing to a crawl company-wide. But an increasing number of companies and agencies are using YouTube videos for instructional, promotional, and general business communication purposes. Locking YouTube out, whether for band-width or productivity concerns (aka screwing around)is a short sighted reaction. Companies are starting to get past the fear of Web 2.0 unknown. Those that persist in the just-say-no approach are bound to miss out on a competitive advantage.

Sneezing Insurance

Comic-Con, the convention for all things comic books, is a highly sought after event. Cities are now falling over each other in an attempt to attract the 2010 convention. Yet, Comic-Con goers are light spenders. If the local economy isn't getting a boost via premium hotel bookings and restaurant expenditures, then why the competition to host Comic-Con, and what could that possibly have to do with your insurance agency?

Comic-Con attendees are prodigious bloggers and users of social and web 2.0 media and communication tools. In the parlance of viral marketing, they are 'sneezers' - people who spread the word. Viral marketing is predicated on the exponential communication effect of one person sharing a message with five friends, and then those friends in turn sharing with five more friends each. Pretty soon thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people have received the same message within a short period of time. Sneezers are critical to a message going viral. Does your agency have any sneezers in your customer base? How could you attract more sneezers, and how can you make it easy for them to share your message with others?

Here are a couple of thoughts...

Insurance newsletter articles can be a little on the dry side. Why not lighten those up by including related, but humorous videos, courtesy of YouTube. The articles might not get 'sneezed' around, but the videos might. Here's two:

Road Rage

Driving with Distractions

Video on Your Insurance Agency Website, Part II

YouTube Videos - Using Third Party Videos

Videos produced and published by others can be a great source or video content for your insurance agency websites. But before you start embedding code, here are some considerations...

1. Copyright Infringements - Be careful what you use, policing is somewhat loose, and video uploaded by others may be be infringing on copyrights. The TV news networks generally take a dim view of others uploading news segments or snippets of television shows. Check to see who posted the video. If it is obviously the owner of the content (e.g., a TV station news broadcast posted to the TV station YouTube site - aka Channel). When in doubt, check directly with the source of the video to make sure the YouTube placement is OK.

2. Don't create a pathway to your competitors. Other insurance providers post video, so before you flag a video as a favorite for display on your Channel, make sure it does not direct viewers to a competitor.

3. Many videos display a link back to another website, just be sure that the website meets your (and your site visitors') standards of decorum.

4. Don't push your luck with attention span. It's best to assume your viewers have limited patience. Try to keep video times under 5 minutes, and make sure the video will engage a viewer within the first 10 to 30 seconds.

Coming in Part III...how to use your website videos

Video on Your Insurance Agency Website, Part I

There has been a steady and growing interest in using video on insurance agency websites. There are lots of options and services available, and the cost of adding video ranges from virtually $0 to several thousands of dollars. Choices can lead to pitfalls on one hand, or increased traffic and conversions on the other. To help insurance agents avoid the former and capitalize on the latter, I'm going to start a several part series on using videos.

Part I - A Few General Tips

1. Don't be gratuitous. Make sure your videos add some value, and are not merely commercials. Commercials are something we endure in exchange for free television programming (although the proliferation of paid cable and Tivo has meant we endure fewer and fewer commercials, even on TV). On a website blatant commercials can be counter productive, irritating visitors and leaving a bad impression. Infomercials can be OK, just be mindful of the balance of value vs. self-promotion.

2. Leave your website visitors in control. Videos that launch automatically, especially on the home page - no matter how cool they seem at first blush - are frequently viewed as unwanted intrusions. Videos can add real value, but let your site visitor decide if they want to switch on a video or not. Nothing is more irritating than listening to itunes, Pandora or Rhapsody while surfing the web and suddenly some audio starts talking over the music. Many companies with well established web presence have tried and discarded auto-launch video, and virtually no established retail or service oriented websites foist videos on site visitors today. For proof in an insurance context, take a look at the arch-nemeses of independent insurance agents: Geico, Esurance, and friend-foe Progressive. They all have video options, but none launch automatically. There is a reason for that.

3. Before you post a video to your site, have a clear objective for the video. Do you want to keep visitors on your site longer? Do you have certain conversion goals like more completed quote forms or phone calls? Maybe a video will have a support role for a check list or article. That's OK too. Just make sure your video(s) has a real job to do, and where possible, measure whether it is doing that job or not.

Add Local Search to Your SEO Arsenal

About the Local Search Video...

To do this video, we purposely used a digital camera to capture screen shots. We normally use a program called Captivate to produce Flash video of screen shots, but that is an extra expense (and a learning curve) for most agents. We did the recording via camera to show how easy it is to produce a video this way, and so you could get a feel for the quality of screen shots captured using camera video.

Captivate, and other screen capture programs, let you annotate screens with text captions and certain highlights. For this video we used the annotation features in YouTube. There are limited annotation options, but we think you will agree that the limitations are not significant for the most common purposes.

We used Google Docs, in a separate tab, for the introduction. Alternatively, we could have used Powerpoint...

As an insurance agent, you could used simple screen shots to break down a policy coverages for customers, or highlight services available through your website.

Eyejot Version - Newsletter Introduction, June 2008

Aging and Your Insurance Agency

"As the estimated 80 million people nationwide born between 1981 and 20001 enter the work force and become active consumers, technology will play a critical role for insurance firms recruiting those in the so-called “millennial generation” as potential employees and customers...

...techonology appears to be a recruitment driver for the insurance industry, which faces a shortage of new workers; 60 percent of its current employees are older than age 45. In fact, 91 percent of millennials stated that being able to work with "newer, innovative technologies" in the workplace would make them more likely to consider a potential job opportunity.

While the insurance industry faces a challange recruiting millennials to replace retirees, a bigger issue might be recruiting them as customers."

Survey Results reported by Insurity and Microsoft Corp. at the ACORD LOMA Insurance Systems Forum 2008, May 13, 2008.

YouTube vs. Eyejot and Blog Pages - Videos for Your Agency Website

You can easily add videos as a regular feature of your insurance agency website by using free (or nearly free) services such as YouTube, Eyejot, and a camcorder, web cam, or your digital camera. You can paste the videos right into your website, or set up a separate blog page for videos. There are a myriad of uses for videos: Introducing agency services, providing updates, introducing account management and service staff. Because there is no cost to producing and posting videos, you can update them regularly, and the use to which you put them is limited only by your imagination. Feel free to share ideas or questions you may have...and start the cameras rolling.

YouTube vs. Eyejot

There are a few differences between YouTube and Eyejot that you might want to consider before selecting one or the other for your video storage and playback on your insurance agency (or other business) website.

YouTube videos are publicly accessible via the YouTube site. This can be a good thing or not, depending on what you want to accomplish. Video information can include links back to your business so the fact that your videos may be found on YouTube may help with web traffic. Inasmuch as YouTube is available via m.google.com offerings, videos you may upload to the service and your videos can be viewed on a mobile browser.

YouTube also allows you to permit or deny others the ability to copy and embed your video in another website. You can also add annotations (like your agency web address), and allow or disable comments from others via the YouTube site. YouTube also provides a number of options that are worth checking out like RSS feeds, statistical tracking that can all help draw people to your videos on YouTube, and to your insurance agency website.

Eyejot videos are accessible to you through an in-box that Eyejot provides. The only way to gain access is if you use Eyejot to send a video email, or if you add the video and player by pasting the embed code onto a web page.

Set Up a Blog for Videos

Pasting embed code onto a web page should be very routine maintenance item that your web master, or hosting provider should turn around quickly. If you aren't able to get quick updates from your provider, or control them yourself, you should really think about changing providers. As an alternative, you can create a website for content you want to change with some frequency, like videos, by using a free blog service like Blogger or WordPress.

Even if you get satisfactory service from your web hosting provider, setting up separate blog pages may be something to consider. You can use these forums as an interactive testimonial page, and you can include information, and resource links that are more tangential to your agency business. You will need your provider to link to your blog page, but that is a one time service request. After that, you can easily control content and changes via the blog administration.*

Eyejot Video Email

As noted in the Act cFluent newsletter article, Eyejot is primarily a video email service The idea is simple, fire up your web cam, do a video, enter an email address and hit send, and the recipient gets an email with a video player embedded in it.

Recipients of your video email will also be able to copy html embed code that the recipient can use to paste into another website.

You could use video emails to extend a personal invitation for an account review, to remotely - yet personally, introduce key staff to customers who might not otherwise get the chance to meet the people that work on their account. Any other ideas?

*Blogs are part of the 'Web 2.0' landscape. One hallmark of Web 2.0 is the ability for the non-technical to use internet based communications by controlling functionality that previously could only be set up and altered by those with technical skills. If you can type a document in Microsoft Word, you can set up and administer a blog site. It's that easy.