Video Part IV - Compressing the Sales Process with Video Testimonials and Securing that New Customer Relationship

Two ways to use the inexpensive Eyejot video email service to differentiate your insurance agency by making a distinguishing impression on new customers,  and compressing the sales process by using video references.  For more, check out the video:

There are 3 levels of the Eyejot service, the first is free, the top level Pro Plus is $100 a year. Try it out at the free level, to get comfortable, but the uses and benefits at the $100 level will pay for itself over and over again.

Search Optimizing Your Insurance Agency Website

The atmospheric noise about website search engine optimization and search ranking has increased significantly in the last year or so.  Insurance agencies are just as caught up in the chatter as other businesses.  Search optimization (SEO) and rank are complex topics, with signficant business implicaitons, so much so that our company, Confluency Solutions, has set aside at least six separate segments of an upcoming best practice series to deal with that single topic.  At the risk of over-simplifying the matter, I'm going to try and deal with the fundemental issues in this one post.  I'm going to do that in three parts by discussing SEO budgeting, metrics to measure website effectiveness, and evaluating a blandishment fom a company offering to provide SEO services.

I don't know if the economy is behind this or not (snake oil salesmen seem to multiply when times are tough), but the insurance agencies we support at Confluency Solutions seem to be hearing from more and more individuals and companies that can 'get you higher search rankings'.  There are legitimate providers of search optimization services (SEO), of course, and I don't mean to besmirch the reputation of the several companies that deliver top notch optimization services.  I'm just musing on our willingness to listen to money-for-nothing pitches when we are casting about for ways to replace lost income.

The role of SEO for an agency website is complicated because quality of traffic has such a bearing on insurance agency profitability.  Most retail businesses, for instance, do not share this challange.  If someone arrives at www.widgets.com, places an order for a widget in exhange for a few dollars, the costs and profit associated with that transaction are pretty much known right then and there.

When someone requests a quote via the www.mostexcellentinsuranceagent.com site, cost and profitability may not be known for sometime, and sometimes not at all.  Here are a few traffic quality questions that insurance agencies need to concern themselves with:  

• How many quotes will I have to provide for each sale?  Will my conversion rate be too low?
• If I spend too much time quoting the wrong kind of business, or quoting prospects that don't convert, how much other income have I forgone from other sources (opportunity cost)?
• How long will I keep that new customer?  How much service burden will they place on my staff?

First of all, let me try and address the question of how much you should budget for SEO.  I'm skipping right past the question of whether you should optimimize at all - you should.  Let me fram the budget issue in terms familiar to an insurance agency.  

Suppose a personal insurance customer pays $4,000 a year to insure a home, cars, and a certain level of life and disability coverage.  If that customer skipped on insurance coverage altogether, they would save $4,000 certain.  If that same customer was involved in a car accident and was sued for $100,000, they would be out a lot of cash in the absence of insurance.  Going in the other direction, that same customer could purchase the most fabulous insurance possible - the highest limits, the lowest deductibles, and buy back all the policy exclusions and limitations - and spend perhaps $20,000 a year in premium.

The right answer for that customer is somewhere between $0 and $20,000 in premium and is a question of balance between cost and risk (and the answer may be $4,000).  For your agency, the $0 in premium is analagous to having no website at all - no money spent, no website traffic.  $20,000 a year might get you a lot of traffic (but not necessarily good quality); so, just with the insurance customer, the right SEO budget answer for your agencyis somewhere in the middle.

Your insurance agency website is an investment in a business tool, and if the investment pays off (ROI), your agency should realize additional commission income in some multiple of the costs associated with the website and SEO.  New income sourced from an agency website is often masked because sales influenced by the website but consummated by phone, for instance.  I'm not going to cover measuring ROI here, but I think it is important to stop and consider there is a level of complexitity to teasing out reliable ROI.  What I am going to cover here are leading edge indicators that will tell you if you are on the right track to acheiving good ROI.  Those indicators are Page Rank, Traffic Counts, and Traffic Quality (I'm going to discuss these in an insurance agency context; for a discussion in a more generalized business context, SEOMoz has an excellent whiteboard on SEO consulting that also addresses these metrics, and I've included that video at the end of this post).

Page Rank

This is the easiest measure to latch onto because we all see it when we do Google searches.  It's also the one measure that is least indicative of SEO success.  Just because one of your web pages ranks in the top 10 in an organic search listing (vs. paid search or local search) doesn't mean you get site traffic, let alone revenue.  Moreover, you would have to ask what 'ranks' and ranks for 'what'?  Search listings return web pages, not 'websites', although search engine algorithms score website quality when performing page ranking.  Individual website pages will rank differently for different search inquiries (that's the ranks for 'what' question).  For instance, searches for these plausible search terms will all display different top 10 lists:  insurance; auto insurance; insurance Asheville NC, Travelers Insurance Asheville NC.  And traffic originating from search on different terms will vary in quality, as we discuss below.

Traffic

This is a better lead edge indicator than page rank because when web searchers click through to your insurance agency website something can actually happen.  That web surfer can come back for another visit, sign up for a newsletter, use an interactive tool, or  - the holy grail - complete an online form or pick up the phone and request a quote.  Without traffic, nothing happens, and since you can have search rank without traffic, traffic numbers are a better measure of SEO effectiveness than search rank.

Traffic Quality

The concept of conversion is not new to insurance agents (e.g., quotes per policy written), and as with quote activity, high conversion website traffic is also better quality.  Not all website visits will result in quotes and commission income on the first go-round, but might produce income later.  Because of that, the definition of conversion should be expanded.  Here are some possibilities:

Average Time on Site; Average Number of Pages Visited; Number of Visits to a Certain Page (like a video, or interactive tool), phone call or email inquiries.

Whatever your definition for 'conversion', those measures, like the ones suggested above, should be harbingers of higher future quote and new income activity.  Traffic from e-newsletter mailings and from local search will exhibit better quality characteristics than organic search traffic, and visitors arriving via organic search, but using different search terms, will also exhibit differing quality  characteristics.  

Finally, on the last topic, evaluating an offer to perform SEO.  Here are some high level considerations that will allow you to dismiss many offers at a glance:

• Did the offer come in an email that resembles spam?  Why would the sender use a gmail or hotmail email address instead of an email domain that matches a company website address?
• If the sender email domain matches a company address, see if you can find a website for that company using that address.  If not, again, why would the sender want to hide?
• If you can find a website for the company, and they are offering SEO for a fee, see how well they rank for a term likely to be used by a company searching for a provider like 'search optimiztion consultants' or 'SEO services'; many spam emails will suggest the term you should search on, and it may not be one that would actually be used by a company seeking SEO help.
• Does the offer guarentee to get you top listings?  Nobody can guarentee that because of all the dynamic elements that go into SEO.
• Is the email offer confined to improving your 'website rank'?  As noted above, search engines 'find' web pages, not websites, and search rank by itself is a weak measure of future ROI. 

At the outset I said this was a complext topic, but I hope this post helps your insurance agency evaluate how to fit SEO into your marketing mix.  If not, (this is the shameless self-promotion part of this post), sign up for the Confluency Solutions newsletter and find out when the best practice series (including a robust treatment of SEO) kicks off.


SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Do You Need SEO Consulting? from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo

Leapfish - Advertising or Investment?

One of the nice folks at Kirby Insurance in Baltimore was recently approached by a company called Leapfish and was offered ownership of a keyword relevant to the insurance agency business.

Who is Leapfish and what do they do?  Leapfish is a new entrant into what is known as meta search - basically aggregated results from other search engines and databases in one place.  They were founded in November of 2008.

What's the reason for launching what appears to be yet another search engine?  A short answer can be found in the words of Leapfish founder Ben Behrouzi, from an intereview with  Betanews, "The Internet has grown so much, and there's so much information, yet most people don't go past the first page of Google and Yahoo in their searches. Tons of stuff is getting lost."

Leapfish has introduced a twist on keyword advertising, allowing you to purchase and 'own' keywords for an up front registration fee and a renewal fee of about 5% of the up front fee.  Ownership of the keyword will guarentee placement in Leapfish paid search listings, and keyword owners can resell their keywords at a later date.  MediaPost reported these prices for various keyword sales:  keyword "diet" sold for nearly $8,000 while "Viagra" sold for $7,000 and "annuity" for $2,000.  Leapfish uses a proprietary algorithm to determine keyword value.

What to do if approached by Leapfish (or another untested company) and asked if you would like to spend a little money with them?  As far as Leapfish goes, there is a lot of good press, and a lot of people, like TechNewsWorld, seem genuinely sanguine about their prospects for success.  There are also some other sources who have adopted a skeptical posture, such as MediaPost and TechCrunch.   

In a sense, 'owning' a keyword is a little like owning a piece of Leapfish.  Will they elbow their way into a crowded search field?  Maybe, but they have to hip-check their way past behemoth Google first.  The fact is that purchasing a keyword with Leapfish right now is more like investing in a start up than budgeting for an ad placement.  Your investment may prove to be worthless, but it may also pay off handsomely in the future.  The risk is wrapped up in the success of Leapfish.  

If your objective is push traffic to your website and write business today, then Leapfish is probably not for you.  On the other hand, if you have a little money to put at risk on an investment, then Leapfish may be worth a longer look.

iPods, Soccer, and Insurance Web Marketing

I have sat through a couple of webinars, and read several articles about web marketing in the last few weeks. And I'm afraid every one of them missed the point. When I hear somebody talk about a tool or medium as a thing unto itself (as in web marketing), I suspect they are too enamored of a new technology and prone to believe that the technology itself constitutes a sea-change. And often, the way that sea-change is positioned in these webinars, you would have to believe that you have to abandon all of your former practices and adapt to the sea-change, or drown in the tidal wash.

Take insurance for example. I would suggest that what people want from insurance providers, and what insurance providers need to deliver, has not changed in decades (if ever); to wit: peace of mind, economy, information on demand. The fact that an insurance agent might be using streaming video on YouTube, a blog, or website to serve up what consumers want doesn't change the essential nature of the business, and probably doesn't constitute a sea-change.

I was reminded of this by my fellow blogger, James Hawley, who flipped me a link to an article appearing in the LA Times. The story featured Manchester United goalkeeper Ben Foster's use of an iPod to study the tendancies of an opposing player. What made the story novel is that the iPod was used just moments before Foster successfully defended a penalty shot.

Foster didn't turn into a technologist or web geek. He was still playing soccor the old fashioned way; he was also just using his powers of observation to stack the goal defense odds in his favor, as goalkeepers have done since the advent of the game. That Foster used an iPod to get a tendancy update moments before a shot didn't change the nature of the game, it just made Foster a smarter player, and resulted in a blocked shot.

Should I Include Staff Bios on My Insurance Agency Website?

In general, I think the most effective bios are the ones that support your agency ‘brand’ and unique value proposition (the things that make you demonstrably different and better than competitors). Suppose for a moment that your brand and UVP include these general attributes:

• Professionalism
• Service
• Personal Relationships

A lot of agencies throw around attributes like those above, but have a hard time backing the words up, or describing what they mean. Staff bios can help. For instance:

• Professionalism – Continuing education, designations, and awards all back up and help explain this attribute; so it’s not a bad idea to include that information in staff bios.
• Service – There are two kinds of service, and the first type has no place on you bios since it does nothing to promote a brand or UVP that would differentiate your agency. The second kind of service merits consideration for publication. I would lump services into two categories: meeting minimum customer expectations, and exceeding expectations. Returning phone calls on a timely basis and processing transactions accurately are both expected. If you don’t measure up, you have a problem; but if you do meet these expectations, you don’t get any extra credit. On the other hand, if you have producers, account managers or CSRs, whose job it is to ‘meet with at least 5 customers a month to review their protection needs’ (annual review) that kind of information can be compelling in a bio. Likewise, individual situations where an agency staff member has found better insurance protection for a customer or helped out in a claims situation will make the ‘service’ component of your UVP tangible and meaningful. Inclusion of these little stories in bios is worthy of consideration.
• Personal Relationships – I read an article a few years ago about medical malpractice lawsuits that pointed out the relationship between average time spent with a patient and the incidence of malpractice lawsuits. The condensed version is that doctors who spent more time with patients were sued less often. That is, those doctors who bothered to build some kind of personal relationship benefited by spending less time in court and paying less for their malpractice insurance. Patients, and people in general, will cut you some slack if they like you; they will also be more likely to refer people to you. You definitely don’t want to be gratuitous in presenting personal info in an online bio; be sure any personal information you provide through staff bios actually represents and supports the kind of relationships you have and want to build. And you definitely don’t want to jeopardize anyone’s safety by putting too much personal information on your website. So this one requires some careful thought, but there are very good reasons for including this kind of information.

Active vs. Passive Bios
You may also want to think about how you might use your online bios. For example, you might want to include links to bios as part of your proposals to prospects (here are the professionals that will be your risk management team); or you might want to routinely include a link to a CSR or Account Manager bio as part of a new business ‘welcome package’, or when there is a change in service assignments.

Are Your Agency Employees Blogging? Should you care?

Your employees might just be inadvertently representing your agency while bouncing around on any of several social networks (LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.). Does your insurance agency need a policy regarding blogging, 'Facebooking' or Tweeting on Twitter? The New York Times seems to think they need one, and here it is:

* Don't specify your political views. This includes joining online groups that would make your political views known.
* Don't write anything you wouldn't write in The Times on your profiles, a blog, or as commentary on content you share.
* Be careful who you 'friend'. Since this is a tricky subject, The Times suggests that its reports "imagine whether public disclosure of a 'friend' could somehow turn out to be an embarrassment that casts doubt on our impartiality."
* Using email addresses found on social networks to contact individuals is fine but the standard rules apply: treat the person fairly and openly and don't "inquire pointlessly into someone's personal life."
* The Standards Editor must be consulted before contact is made with a minor.

A complete article about the NY Times and their social networking policy can be found at Econsultancy (head up courtesy of WOMMA).

Liabilities and Exposures Created When Agency Business Email is Forwarded to Personal Accounts

I have had several insurance agency managers and owners tell me recently that they have employees who prefer to forward business emails to personal accounts because they are more comfortable with their personal email service, or they want to work at home and the agency doesn't have or permit web mail access to the agency email.

You cannot stop agency employees from forwarding emails to themselves, but approving of the practice can create some risks for your agency.

• Emails sitting on home computers can potentially be viewed by any family member; and especially where the family includes kids, by friends of family members. It is inevitable that private client information will be contained in some of these emails. Allowing employees to forward business emails creates privacy violation possibilities.
• You have some control over viruses when employees use business email,but not so much when personal email is used. What happens when your employees’personal (business email) transmits a virus that crashes a client’s business email? The possibilities are gruesome and numerous.
• Permitting employees to forward work emails to personal accounts can allow individual employees, over time,to amass a good deal of account information in a repository outside of the agency. That provides a great big hole in any measures you may have taken to protect proprietary account information, and can make it easier for an employee leaving the agency to take accounts with them.
• What about allowing only ‘trusted employees’ to forward business email to personal accounts? Unfortunately, the precedent set can allow another ‘less trusted’ employee to forward email and then claim they didn’t realize the policy regarding forwarding emails was selective.

Employees may still forward emails, but random monitoring of outgoing email should alert you to an violations of a policy against forwarding to personal addresses.

Your Insurance Agency's "Community" Reputation

I have long encouraged agents to take control of their online reputation. Monitoring feedback left by others at various online rating and search services is a must. Encouraging positive feedback is even better.

I recently concluded a purchase on eBay (where buyers and sellers are sometimes referred to as the 'EBay community) and received an email soliciting not just my direct feedback, but also a request to rate my experience via the eBay seller rating function. Here's the email (names omitted to protect the innocent:

Thank you for your purchase from Business Name Omitted.

We received note that your order has been delivered and would like to verify that you are satisfied with your purchase and our service.

Please reply to this email if there is anything that would keep you from giving us 5 stars on all ratings. We'll do what it takes to make it right.

If you are satisfied we would highly appreciate it if you would leave us positive feedback with 5 stars on all ratings on eBay. Please use this link: Direct Link to eBay Rating for Seller Omitted.

We have already added positive feedback to your ebay profile. Your feedback can be viewed at:
Direct Link to my eBay Profile and Rating Omitted.

If you have any questions you can either reply to this email or call us at Phone Number Omitted.

Thank you for your business,
Business Name Omitted

Taking a cue from this approach and using a version of this email after every agency sale, renewal, or claim will deliver multiple benefits. First, you will be systematically probing to be sure your customers are happy and will be building stronger relationships (aka, less price sensitivity, more referrals). Second, you will far outstrip your competition in the number positive reviews your agency has at Google Maps (local search), Yahoo Local, Yelp, etc. All you have to do is insert the direct link for rating at those services into your standard email, similar to the example above.

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.

Sign Up for the Act cFluent Newsletter

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.