Why online self-service? According to IIAA consumer attitude surveys, about 80% of consumers want online access as one of their insurance service options. Allstate has taken online service seriously, making it available to its policyholders and integrating it with agency and call center channels.
Interestingly, agents are much less inclined to believe their customers want online access than consumers claim they do. Are agents being practical and consumers fantasizing? Do agents know that people ask for all kinds of things they never use? Or, are agents out of touch with their customers?
Other financial service providers have been more aggressive than P&C agents and carriers in providing online service and seem to be having some success. It's now commonplace for consumers to handle many of their banking and securities activities online.
And why not? Online self-service may be a little more work for customers than delegating the task, but customers gain control -- completing the task in one sitting and at a time and place most convenient for them.
It's not only customers who benefit from online self-service. The agency has a great deal to gain as well. Certainly satisfied customers are more likely to continue being customers. But customers who use self-service, at least some of the time, are likely to be better, more profitable accounts for an agency. Online self-service can reduce some of the service burden an agency faces, leaving CSRs more time to provide more value to the customer. And online self-service sessions can be an ideal venue to cross-sell what's relevant to a particular customer.
What's not to like? Online self-service is an obvious win for the customer and the agency. So why is online self-service so infrequently implemented? One reason, I think, is that many agents don't have enough information. They don't know what is available and how to put it to use. Sounding Line's charter is to provide agents the information and insight they need.
What?
What elements might be included in a self-service offering? That depends to some extent on your agency -- its current automation and business focus. For instance, some agency management systems provide a leg-up for online self-service, but others don't. Or a commercial lines agency with contractor customers might want to provide access to online certificate issuance, but a smaller personal lines agency wouldn't have the need.
Ultimately, an agency must find out from its customers what they want. That can come through surveys, focus groups, and customer response to service offerings. In the interest of getting the process started, I've created a candidate list below. Note that I haven't (much) distinguished between personal and commercial lines. In many cases, the needs are similar, but met with different content. You can add/delete/edit to create a possibilities list relevant to your agency.
How?
OK, online self-service looks attractive and there are scores of candidates to consider, but how do you actually do it? What should you do yourself? What help can you get from your existing vendors and its offerings? Where can you look for additional sources of out-facing services?
A useful way to look at online self-service functions is to break them down into three categories: 1) general information, 2) customer-specific information, and 3) requests for service
So, for instance, information about your agency or carriers is general information, a schedule of insurance is customer-specific information, and a vehicle change request is an example of a request for service.
General information sources include your agency, third-party insurance content suppliers, and generic content suppliers. Customer-specific information can come directly or indirectly from your management system or a completely separate service. Requests for service can occur via e-mail or forms, for instance.
We've covered some sources of third-party insurance content in other articles citing, for instance,www.jcrs.com, www.roughnotes.com, www.imms.com, www.ratingservices.com, and, in this issue,www.fscrater.com. We'll continue to add to the inventory in the future.
Customer-specific information can come from agency management systems, and we've covered one approach with the i-REP (www.gonsg.com) article on page 10 in this issue. It can also come from carriers via their Web sites. We'll cover this category in detail below.
Requests for service can be satisfied in a number of ways, attached to or separate from management systems. In prior issues we looked at www.ecertsonline.com, a special certificates service. In future issues, we will cover other certificate services, claims services, small business insurance services, and other special purpose ASPs. Requests for service can also be satisfied through online forms (www.quoteforms.com) or even e-mail. And the requests can be independent of or integrated with an agency's management system. More below.
Customer-specific information
Typically, customers may want to know about the billing and payment aspects of their policies, see various elements of the policies, track claims, and view the status of various agency open service items. Where would this information come from and how would it appear on the agency Web site? Most likely it would come from agency management and carrier systems.
As far as I know, there are presently four different approaches to providing (at least some of the) agency account, policy, billing/payment, claims, and activity status information into an agency Web site: extensions to the management system provided by the vendor; real-time interaction with the management system provided by a third party; duplication of the agency database by a third part; and access to carrier systems.
1. Agency management system extension -- Both Applied Systems (www.appliedsystems.com) and AMS Services (www.amsservices.com) provide Web-enabled, customer access extensions to their management systems. The agency provides the Internet server that hosts the customer access functionality and agency site. The agency server and vendor supplied software interacts with the management system for security and data retrieval actions. The customer receives current content from the management system, but doesn't actually use the management system itself. That level of insulation makes a great deal of sense.
One advantage of using a management system extension is that it's supported by the same vendor that the agency already depends on. But there are disadvantages. In particular, some management system extensions are not as feature-rich as some third-party alternatives.
2. Real-time interaction with management system -- At least one third-party, NSG (www.gonsg.com) provides real-time interaction with the agency management system (in this case AMS' AfW). Unbeknownst to the customer, the agency Web site links to the NSG site, which formats and presents the information. The NSG site, in turn, uses the Internet to communicate with the agency's system -- requesting and receiving information -- almost as a CSR would. In some ways, the NSG alternative is better integrated with the management system than the way primary vendors have chosen (thus far) to implement (free-form e-mail).
3. Duplicate database -- A third approach, offered by idNET (www.goidnet.com), is to duplicate the agency database regularly (daily or less often) to their Web site and provide customer information access there. idNet supports Applied's TAM and AMS' AfW and Sagitta systems. Though the data access isn't real-time, a nightly update is probably adequate in most cases. Also, idNet provides a 24x7 service center to supply high-touch interaction to supplement the online customer access capability.
4. Carrier system access -- A fourth approach is for the agency to provide access through its site to information contained in a carrier's system. For agencies that don't keep policy detail, this can be an attractive approach. And, it may be the only way to access up-to-date direct bill information. But click-through to a carrier hosted customer self-service Web page has some disadvantages, not the least of which is that it disintermediates the agency from the customer service transaction. Some agencies may want to get out of the service loop, but for those that believe that account retention depends on it, click-through to a carrier may not be attractive.
From the customer's point of view, click-through may be a clumsy, frustrating experience with the customer needing to deal with yet another set of logon and password codes. And agency customers with policies from multiple carriers may find clicking through to multiple carrier systems even more vexing than agencies having to use a multiplicity of carrier ASPs.
Requests for service
Agencies can avail themselves of at least five different approaches to providing online requests for service: free-form e-mail, Web forms, management system related, carrier related, and specialty ASPs.
1. Free-form e-mail -- In this case, the insured sends an e-mail from the agency Web site to the agency asking for a change. It's a straightforward matter for agencies to implement service e-mail on their Web sites. E-mail links can be inserted into any Web site page so that when clicked on will open the insured's e-mail program, initiate a new message, and populate the "To" field with the address the agency wants used.
But free-form e-mail doesn't encourage the customer to provide exactly the right information, which could prompt follow-up. And, it leaves interpretation and processing to the CSR who now must deal with requests outside of the normal management system suspense queue.
2. Web forms -- Some agencies include service request forms on their Web sites. The forms are empty; that is, they are not pre-filled in any way, but do encourage insureds to include all the information required to effect, for example, a particular policy change. The agency may forward the filled-in form to the carrier as an e-mail attachment and then receive the changes into their system via download or enter the change into the management system and then upload it to the carrier.
Customers may find Web forms clumsy to use since they likely will have to find a copy of their policy to know what to fill into the empty form (insureds have a hard time keeping track of their paper policies). In addition, it doesn't do much for the carrier since it must deal with the e-mail attachment manually. But one could imagine forms that included XML extensions so that the carrier could process them without manual intervention.
3. Management system related -- In this scenario, the customer accesses information from the agency management system (indirectly), which is then displayed on the customer's screen next to a change form. The customer fills in the change form, which then goes into the management system suspense system for a CSR to process. Ideally, the CSR would not have to re-key any information, but only view the new data next to the old and then approve the change.
As far as I can tell, only one vendor (NSG) actually integrates the request for service into the normal agency workflow, but it does not take the next step of making the update into the management system, which is a simple "click-to-approve" process.
4. Carrier related -- In this case, the agency site has provided a click-through to the carrier's insured service page. The customer views information and then requests service using whatever functionality the carrier provides. The agency finds out about policy changes via download after the carrier has processed and fulfilled the request.
Though convenient for the agency (because it never sees the request), it's not clear that this approach is really what most insureds are looking for. Furthermore, this method tends to further disintermediate the agency.
5. Specialty ASPs -- A number of special purpose ASPs have sprung up recently that focus on certain common service request tasks. For instance, there are a number that focus on the management and delivery of certificates and evidence of property forms. Others support the claims process from first notice of loss through resolution by connecting the insured, agents, carriers, and adjusters. Another group supports the commercial lines submission process with work flow and document management capabilities that link the prospect/insured with the producer/ CSR and underwriters at multiple carriers.
Generally, the specialty ASPs provide a deeper and more flexible service than is available through a conventional management system. So, for example, certificate ASPs may bring the holder into the process as well, thus relieving both the insured and agency of having to deal with all certificate issuance.
For the most part, however, specialty ASP services are not integrated with agency management systems. That means agencies must key some information into two systems. Presumably the net time savings for the agency is so attractive that double-entry is worth it. Perhaps over time the ASPs will be integrated with agency management system databases, though the management system vendors may consider them competitors. Or, perhaps, management systems will eventually be replaced by integrated collections of services provided to an agency by many different vendors and carriers.
Future reporting
As pointed out above, Sounding Line has already reviewed a number of online customer self-service capabilities in the general information, specific information, and request for service categories. More are included in this issue and will be in future issues. Online customer self-service, as an element of out-facing services (that also includes marketing and sales elements) will become a critical part of agent's increasing value to their customers in the years ahead. A great number of useful self-service elements are already available to agencies and can be installed into their Web sites with little effort. More are on the way. Much to their customers' delight, agencies of the future will provide significant online self-service, and it will be tailored, one-to-one, to customers' interests and needs. Stay tuned.
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