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Insurance Age Magazine

Brokers and the web Q&A

1 March 2006

As more and more consumers search the world wide web for their insurance quotes it becomes even more imperative for brokers to start using this medium more effectively.

Although most of the insurance searches are based around personal lines products such as motor or home there is the strong possibility that basic small and medium-sized enterprise products will also become available online for consumers to purchase.However, many brokers may not even have a web presence or a limited one which only gives basic details such as their address, contacts and a list of products.

That being said, other brokers are waking up to the potential of this media. Insurance Age spoke to one such broker, Simon Hickman, marketing and operations director at Access Underwriting.

When did you first realise you would have to set up a website and start trading on the web?

Soon after we first started trading in 2000 we realised we would need to be able to communicate with potential policyholders so that they could obtain more information about us in order to make a decision on whether to deal with us or not. We also wanted to be able to sell some associated risk management products and this required a shopping cart and online payment facilities.

How did you go about setting up the website?

We started by searching for web developers on the internet and looked at their portfolio of work to see if they had developed websites which contained good online payment facilities and where we liked the look of some of the designs. We then obtained prices and made a decision.

The web developer sourced the web space. The development was quite quick and all communication regarding this process was done by Microsoft Messenger. We have revamped the site once since then and are now in the middle of another major redesign and rebuild.

What ups and downs did you have along the way?

The only down I can think of was when the Financial Services Authority came along. We were no longer able to accept payments for our security products by the same card processing terminal so we had to set up another merchant number and have a second card machine to take these payments.

The ups have been a tremendous boost in enquiries and these are from areas where we have specifically targeted various types of business. In fact, our charity and not-for-profit division is driven almost exclusively from internet enquiries.

Our next update, due for launch at the end of February, is an online quotation system being developed by Whitespace Software which is a specialist in automated scheme software. The development will allow access by our brokers to our products during normal business hours and also out of hours. The portal will also be used to generate leads for our brokers.

Would you suggest that other brokers take on experts or in-house staff to handle the website?

I know of one smaller broker, Portwood, in the North-east, which handles the development of its own website - there may be others. In general, unless you are a large broker with a definite strategy and able to employ suitably qualified staff, it would be best left to experts to develop the sites. However, many web developers are now offering template driven websites with content management systems which allow pages to be added quickly and easily without the web developer actually being involved. We mix and match as required as some processes are quite straightforward, but other areas which require programming and automation are outsourced.

Why do you think brokers are not more proactive on the web?

If you are going to use the internet, you need to have a proper strategy in place to deal with the resulting enquiries. It's all too easy to deal with the telephone calls while the internet enquiries are left to one side. The language and technology of developers also needs to be understood and unless you do, it is difficult to cut to the chase and understand what is going on. I have spent five years working with our site and am still learning. Some examples are: do you want Linux or Windows hosting? What type of database will you require? mySQL or SQL? How much bandwidth will you use? How much storage space do you need? Do you need ASP.Net 1.0 or 2.0? What are your keywords? Is your site search engine optimised?

If it is, have you applied best practice conversion techniques to drive people to make enquiries? Do you want your site developed with Flash? What about validation, Java Script HTML and CSS styles?

Some companies quote colossal figures for web development and it becomes difficult to understand what the added benefits are -this is especially so if you have an established book of business and established marketing channels.

The internet is now getting quite sophisticated in terms of marketing in the areas where there is great demand, such as car insurance, where on 14 February 2006, 2,660,000 web results were returned from Google in the UK for the distinct search term "car insurance". If you take those quote marks out there are 13,200,000 results. The top eight were the same and the last two changed. Of these 10, three were brokers and not small ones at that. Even Direct Line was not in the Top 10. So brokers wanting to attract car insurance via the internet will have to think long and hard about a suitable strategy.

Three brokers from the Insurance Age Broker Forum had a good idea of harnessing the power of links on the internet to achieve high rankings for the popular search criteria in the personal lines market called: www.mylocalinsurancebroker.co.uk.

Despite the number of people accessing the forum, very few were interested, yet if a good number of brokers from a major town in the UK decided to join, they would be able to drive enquiries through to themselves rather than to the direct insurers.

What has been the biggest benefit to your business from your website?

Definitely the volume of targeted enquiries. The ability to target niche areas and to grow our income with leads which have a low cost of acquisition.

What advice would you give to brokers about setting up a website and dealing on the web?

You need to understand why you want a web presence. Is it to provide an electronic brochure for example? Or is it to pull in enquiries? I can see no reason why every broker does not have a basic site in this day and age. If it is the latter you need to be more careful who you use and will need to know exactly the market you wish to target and drivers for cost of acquisition. You might want to use a graphic designer to set up the corporate look of a web page and have that put together by a website builder who has specialist knowledge in search engine optimisation. This will allow your site to be found more easily by the search engines in their natural listings. The next step is internet promotion based among other elements, site submission, paid placements, affiliate programmes, linking strategies and refreshed content.

Name: Access Underwriting

Number of staff: Six

Size of business: £1.75m gross written premium

Established: 2000

COMPANY HISTORY

Established as an underwriting agency for sports and super sports motorcycle insurance distributing to regional motorcycle brokers. Diversified to include a direct broking division for church, charity and non profit markets in 2002. Constantly investigating and adding additional services

COMPANY ETHOS

We are an ethical broker having underwriting and broking skills to enable us to effectively present and provide individual underwriting and service and solutions in an electronic world. To our clients, we are their insurance department

LINES OF BUSINESS

Niche areas include: Charities; Not for profit.

Source: Insurance Age