Analytics

In spite of centuries of sales experience, most insurers rely heavily on price for acquiring and retaining customers. The reality is that customers base insurance purchasing decisions on many factors. While this does not mean that we can ignore pricing, it does mean that alternatives exist for insurers to remain competitive.For some companies, the frustrating cycle of hard and soft markets will not exist. By relying on the power of data mining, they can maintain the consistency and accuracy of their underwriting decisions; they can significantly reduce the impact of fraudulent claims; and they can have a better understanding of their customers' wants and needs.

March 2002: Upset about the size of his annual bonus, a global financial services employee planted a "logic bomb" that deleted 10 billion customer records. The incident affected more than 1,300 of the company's servers throughout the United States. The company sustained losses of approximately $3 million-the amount required to repair damage and reconstruct deleted files.

Imagine leaving your sales and marketing efforts to guesswork. Not understanding your customer's age, lifestyle, income or other factors would spell certain disaster for any insurance carrier trying to market or cross-sell specific products.Amica Life Insurance, a wholly owned subsidiary of Amica Mutual Insurance Company, is one company that decided to attack its marketing efforts with statistical intelligence.

The South African insurer has consolidated customer data from 15 disparate sources into one worksite marketing information system that provides a 360-degree view of its customers for its advisors.Talk to just about any insurance executive whose company embarked on a customer relationship management (CRM) initiative in the early 1990s and you'll likely hear a similar story. "Dirty data" often played a key role in the failure of those projects to deliver the expected results.

Insurance firms must perform more due diligence if they want their Web sites to net them greater revenues. That is one of the crucial messages of a recent study from Forrester Research, a Cambridge, Mass.-based technology and market research firm, as a litany of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and a blur of technology offerings in the Web analytics field make insurers' search for the ideal vendor a murky proposition.The Forrester report, titled "How Web Analytics Buyers Structure Contracts," indicates that too many companies are rashly choosing vendors to tackle a very important element of their success strategies: maximizing their business on the Internet.

No single strategic objective in the insurance industry offers the profit potential of policyholder retention and cross-selling. It has been documented that multi-relationship policyholders are more likely to renew.Further, the cost to sell renewals and additional policies to current customers is dramatically less than initial customer acquisition costs.

Greensboro, N.C. - DataDelta Inc. has launched its first "Single Customer View Accuracy Survey" in partnership with market research firm The CDI Institute. Burlingame, Calif. The purpose of the survey is to measure single customer view accuracy that results from customer data integration (CDI) projects.The initial survey results will be presented at the 17th Information Quality Conference hosted by Larry English and The International Association for Information and Data Quality (IAIDQ) September 19-23 in Houston, Texas.

A survey conducted by AIIM, a Silver Spring, Md., enterprise content management (ECM) association, reveals that while cost reduction is still dominant in driving ECM decisions, compliance and payback are growing in popularity.AIIM surveyed more than 1,200 end users and potential end users of content and document management technologies in nine countries: the U.S., U.K., Ireland, Germany, Australia, and the Benelux countries (Belgium, Netherlands and Luxemburg).

Computers are supposed to shorten or take over routine tasks for us, freeing human brains and hands for creative projects beyond the capabilities of machinery. Frequently, however, users find themselves at the mercy of their mainframes, desktops and laptops, performing repetitive input chores and time-consuming database maintenance functions. Now, a technology that takes advantage of automated Internet resources is allowing carriers to skip the middlemen and take the data directly where it needs to go - the agent and the consumer - without costly delays.Being able to use this type of technology to streamline the release of new products and reduce the time it takes to announce changes in a product's pricing structure is a growing need faced by most carriers. Such was the concern of Electric Insurance Company (EIC), a Beverly, Mass., carrier whose roots date to 1966 when it provided insurance for employees of General Electric. Today EIC, licensed in all 50 states, has expanded its P&C direct-to-customer rates to the general public.

In the late 1990s, when insurance firms were running high loss ratios (from 110 to 130), Lombard Canada Ltd., one of the oldest property and casualty insurance operations in Ontario, hired a consulting firm to assess its underwriting and claims leakage while it sought to improve IT and drive down expenses.With the firm's help, Lombard's loss ratio started dropping. While other Canadian firms were still grappling with hefty loss ratios, Lombard moved on to major technological decisions.