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<\/p>\nA mystery life insurance shopper \u2013 call her Alice \u2013 bought term coverage for her family recently and was thoroughly stumped.<\/p>\n
Filling out her family\u2019s details in online forms in exchange for an estimated monthly premium was easy enough, but the follow up was another, mostly nonexistent, story.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey can lure you to the website and then they leave you hanging,\u201d said Forrester Research consultant Ellen Carney, who adopted Alice as a pseudonym.<\/p>\n
In Alice\u2019s experience, MassMutual scored highest with an overall point total of 66, while New York Life scored lowest with a point total of 30, according to the report which tracked the buying experience from seven life insurers.<\/p>\n
Alice rated the seven insures across 11 categories. Here\u2019s what she found:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Under pressure from born-digital agencies free of the high-cost structures weighing down legacy shops, life insurers have sunk millions of dollars into their digital sales channels in anticipation of more online sales.<\/p>\n
But the follow up and the integration of human help following a journey that only hours before started on a website remains all over the proverbial map, Carney said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Insurers give the impression that websites as a sales channel don\u2019t matter all that much in an era when digital sales are expected to increase, said Carney, co-author of a new report on life insurance website sales.<\/p>\n
Insurers need to fix their websites, and quickly, said Carney, principal analyst, Digital Business Strategy, at Forrester.<\/p>\n
Agents followed up with buyers via email, others preferred to call \u2013 several times \u2013 and still others never bothered to track down prospects like Alice who had initiated a term life purchase online.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt goes back to no one is holding advisors accountable if you haven\u2019t followed up,\u201d Carney said.<\/p>\n
For too long, life insurers underinvested in their digital and website sales channels, and with falling commissions, agents have little or no incentive to chase term life prospects who abandon an online shopping cart.<\/p>\n
Give those drawbacks, it\u2019s incumbent on insurers to say, \u201cHoly Cow, we need to better handle this class of customer,\u201d Carney said.<\/p>\n
Last year, digital touchpoints influenced 84 percent of all new life insurance sales and that percentage is forecast to rise to 91 percent in 2020, which is a big increase in a relatively short period of time, Carney said.<\/p>\n
Insurers must act quickly to fix their websites as a growing number of insurance technology startups are coming after Millennials with digital sales tools and seamless digital user experiences, the report said.<\/p>\n
Back to Alice.<\/p>\n
She was from Ohio, she was 36 years old, had two children and an employed husband, gave her address and listed her primary care physician, all standard fare for insurance companies looking for data on which to return a monthly quote.<\/p>\n
A quote came back for $18 a month.<\/p>\n
But it wasn\u2019t long before Alice\u2019s digital relationships floundered.<\/p>\n
Advisor and agent locators were poorly executed, cross-selling of other relevant services were either limited or absent, information about acceptance and underwriting decisions was missing, and basic help getting the online application complete couldn\u2019t be found, the Forrester report said.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a symptom of where the digital channel resides within the insurer, Carney said.<\/p>\n
The pendulum swings from a central digital management platform to embedding the digital experience across channels to moving digital initiatives into operations to moving digital to the marketing side of the house.<\/p>\n
\u201cMarketing cares about driving leads and operations cares about saving money,\u201d Carney said.<\/p>\n
A rootless, orphaned digital channel is reflected in the buying experience for consumers like Alice who feel like they are riding in the back of a Jeep hopscotching off-road instead of traveling across a smooth Interstate highway.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome insurers have a long way to go,\u201d Carney said. \u201cI\u2019m surprised digital teams don\u2019t have whiplash, one minute they are there, another they are over here, my gosh.\u201d<\/p>\n
InsuranceNewsNet Senior Writer Cyril Tuohy has covered the financial services industry for more than 15 years. Cyril may be reached at cyril.tuohy@innfeedback.com.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a9 Entire contents copyright 2018 by InsuranceNewsNet.com Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this article may be reprinted without the expressed written consent from InsuranceNewsNet.com.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n The post Mystery Shopper Rates Insurers Online<\/a> appeared first on InsuranceNewsNet<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A mystery shopper found that insurance companies are not putting their best selves forward online. Most of the shortcomings arise from the lack of follow-through.<\/p>\n The post Mystery Shopper Rates Insurers Online<\/a> appeared first on InsuranceNewsNet<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":578,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8538"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/578"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8538"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8538\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8539,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8538\/revisions\/8539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}