response time to contact and it shows there’s 100 times increase in contact rate at the five minute mark vs. the 30 minute mark with respect to when you reach out to a consumer who’s submitted a lead.
Then on the right is a chart that shows the qualification rate. And at the five minute mark you get a 21 times increase in qualification rate than you do at the 30 minute mark. So, it’s just a age-old problem that we’ve had with the whole lead business and these companies and agents aren’t very good at quick response, quick contact rate and that’s how companies like Double Positive have come into the insurance industry to help carriers and agents solve that age old problem.
So, with that I’ll turn it back over to Lee and Paul. Thank you very much.
TINNIRELLO: Jaimie, thanks a lot. I have a few questions just to follow up real quick. Jaimie, your slide that showed the leading carriers in terms of their Web presence – it’s my observation that there’s probably a correlation between those carriers that are advertising on TV and magazines, etc., and their Web usage. Do you see the same correlation between those that are heavily advertising outside the Web to get onto the Web in terms of their actual growth in interaction?
JAIMIE: Yes, I’m sure it definitely plays a role you know with the Geicos and Progressives and State Farm and Allstate to a certain extent, spending literally hundreds of millions of dollars on off-line advertising. You’ve got to intuitively believe that does translate into consumers going online and searching for them and going to their sites. But if you look – there are a couple of players there that don’t advertise that much off-line – if any – Netquote and InsWeb and they’re in the top five.
TINNIRELLO: So that would be encouraging for other carriers who don’t have deep pockets for advertising on the off-line media to be able to play in the same mode as the online players are doing right now, is that correct?
JAIMIE: Absolutely. And we do see more and more players get into the online advertising game every month. So, absolutely, we see that and obviously it’s effective otherwise that trend would not be continuing.
TINNIRELLO: The other question for you, Jaimie, is the follow up I want to do on the reader or user feedback. Is it wise for carriers to allow their customers to make commentary on the products and service they receive in an unedited mode? Does that either bring more value to the product? Isn’t there a risk of criticism that may be detrimental to them? What’s your view on that?
PICKLES: That’s what many carriers are afraid of. That’s why you don’t see that functionality on sites. But then if you go to any other consumer retail site you’ll see user-generated content is allowed and what happens, Paul, consumers kind of self-regulate it. So, if there’s a comment that’s either inappropriate or untrue or just doesn’t make sense, the users will actually gauge and vote on individual comments such that those that are worthless or inappropriate actually don’t even get viewed.
McDONALD: Thank you Jaimie. That was an excellent presentation. At this point we’re going to turn the presentation over to John Pogas. John is an old friend of the E-Fusion conference and he has been a judge for the E-Fusion awards at different times. He’s extremely knowledgeable about e-commerce and insurance. He has his hand in many sites – some you don’t recognize and some you do. He’s a long-time veteran of the insurance industry and technologically very knowledgeable, so welcome, John.
JOHN POGAS: Thanks, Lee. Thanks for having me and thanks to A.M. Best and welcome to everyone listening in. What I’m going to present is really more of a 50,000 foot view of how we do e-commerce at Aon Affinity. Because we really are trying to market insurance in what has really become a YouTube world, YouTube being the most traveled site on the Internet now.
So, how do you make a Website interesting, especially when you’re selling something as uninteresting as insurance – let’s be frank. A lot of what we do is try to leverage the e-commerce expertise from different consumer product segments. People on our team have expertise from consumer product marketing, from the dot-com era, there are some from financial services, so it’s really leveraging that expertise across the board.
The big mistake a lot of organizations make is that they tend to use the expertise from the IT department. Certainly, the IT department is going to have a hand in developing your e-commerce solution and certainly make the right technological suggestions. But if you’ve ever seen an commerce solution that was developed by a pure IT department, it’s not very pretty and not very useful. Highly functional, lots of great technology in it, but there’s really not a lot of marketing built into it.
You also should make it interesting by making it very savvy with what I call relevant metrics and not