Web sales and service functions require on-line forms. Your Webmaster can
create your forms from scratch or you can acquire them ready-made from this
supplier. Quoteforms provides insurance information content, Web site design,
and Website hosting services as well - a complete Web package for independent
agents.
by John Ashenhurst
If you want to provide some way for your Web site visitors to request quotes for a variety of insurance products, you need to give them an orderly way to supply you with the information you need to respond. A full-fledged online quoting package can provide that, but you may not want to provide online quotes. Your Web site sales strategy may be to collect information from a prospect and then conduct telephone or in-person interviews.
If you want to provide some way for your existing customers to make service requests through your Web site, you will need to provide them with the relevant tools, namely ap-propriately-designed service forms.
Quoteforms, a new site provided by Enhanced Web Services, makes available to agents a large inventory of insurance quote and service forms they can use on their Web sites. The forms inventory, with continuing additions, was built over the last three years through collaboration with scores of agencies, reports James Klepac, Quoteforms owner and six-year veteran of agency Web site design projects.
Quoteforms provides two ways agencies can license and use forms: agency-hosted or secure-server hosted. Under the first plan, the agency pays a one-time fee for a license to use the form and then is provided the HTML code for the form. The agency imbeds the form into a page on its Web site.
When the agency site visitor completes the form and submits it, the Web page is actually sent to the Quoteforms site, where the data is parsed out and e-mailed back to the agency for attention. Quoteforms does not charge for the forms processing service. According to Klepac, unpacking the forms on the Quoteforms server is much simpler for all concerned. The alternative would be for Quoteforms to provide unpacking software for each agent's Web site, a problem because of the great variety of server environments agencies use.
Since few agencies have secure Web sites and because some forms require input of what site visitors might consider private information, Quoteforms provides a second forms alternative. The agency licenses the form but the form actually resides on the Quoteforms secure server. The data acquired from the site visitor is not e-mailed back to the agency. That would compromise the security of the data. Instead, Quoteforms e-mails the agency a notice that a form has been submitted with instructions on how to download it without going through e-mail. Besides providing the security some Web visitors might demand, the secure-server alternative is more convenient to the agency as well. It need only provide a link on its site to the form on the Quoteforms server, a much simpler HTML coding issue than imbedding the form itself.
Possible concerns
The forms provided by the vendor are not rigorous data entry vehicles. They provide only labeled fields, and by agency request, no fields are mandatory. According to Klepac, most agencies do not want to impose too much discipline on their Web site visitors. Web visitors are likely to be turned off by and abandon forms and processes that are too demanding. The agents are happy to get whatever they can in a lead or policy change request.
For those agents who want mandatory fields on their forms, other kinds of editing, or even completely new forms, Kelpac is happy to oblige and will customize forms to agent's specifications.
The online service forms are completely empty when provided to the insured on the agent's Web site. They are not pre-filled with current policy information because there is no connection between the forms and the agency's management system. It's likely that the forms submitted by the insured will be incomplete or inaccurate. They will require agency staff intervention and checking before being sent on to the company (or used internally).
Some agents would never be willing to use what they considered a fatally flawed and extra-work-producing system. On the other hand, some agents are happy to provide customers another, reasonably organized channel of communication with the agency. They would argue that the point isn't about implementing an ideal system that is guaranteed to reduce agency work load, but about providing customers what they want (Web site service access) and then improving the insides of the process over time.
Which position is right? It depends on the culture of the agency. Overall, my sympathies lie with agents who want to take small, affordable steps now to provide Web site customer service functions and improve them later.
Insurance information content
Besides its forms services, Quoteforms supplies an insurance glossary agents can add to their sites to provide definitions to insurance-uninitiated visitors. Quoteforms also provides a newsfeed from moreover.com. That organization provides news feeds for free so you could make your own arrangements if you chose. On the other hand, for a modest fee Quoteforms will install the news feed into the agent's site. The Quoteforms news feed sample page demonstrates access to four categories of news: insurance, financial, business, and world news.
Design and hosting services
Enhanced Web Services, the progenitor of Quoteforms, began life as a custom Web site design/build shop and it continues to provide those services. Because of its insurance agency specialization, and because it has created so many Web sites, the organization has a great deal of intellectual capital to call on in both the insurance and technical spheres. Therefore, it can generally help an agency refine its goals, text, and graphics strategy and get the site up and running in a short period of time for a reasonable fee. Each site is unique and appropriate to the agency's personality and business plan. But the vendor's learning and development curve is significantly compressed.
In an effort to provide a complete Web site service to agencies, Quote-forms provides Web site hosting, domain name registration, and two levels of search engine registration as well.
For agents interested in adding stock and/or custom quote and/or service forms to their sites, check out www.quoteforms.com. For agents who need help in getting started with a Web site, in making improvement by adding textual content, or in doing a major overhaul, it's worth seeing whether Quoteforms can meet your needs.
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