The Guardian newspaper in the UK reported that the UK government is looking at closing up to 75% of its websites. The challenges facing the UK government in terms of cutting costs and ensuring that they are getting value from assets are no different to the issues facing insurers in these uncertain economic times. Whilst it may not be typical to look at the approaches taken in the public sector to cost cutting, there are some interesting features of the approach taken by the government.
Of particular interest was a KPI quote in the report regarding cost-per-visit. The article cites one website that costs £11.78 per visit versus one that costs £2.75 per visit. Such an analysis and metric would be most useful to insurers—particularly those that are operating multiple brands on different sets of technology. Of course, getting to the true cost of running a website can be difficult, but an educated estimate, along with existing website analytics data would allow a similar analysis—one that could produce the same savings for a direct insurer or any insurer with multiple Internet applications.
The other point made in the report is that some government units were competing with each other in terms of marketing and search engine optimization spend. For instance, having two units in the same organization bidding for the same search term in Google advertising is simply not cost effective. As above, for any insurer operating multiple websites or multiple brands this kind of activity could be prevalent, but not immediately obvious; perhaps this is something insurers could review and see where savings could be made.
I doubt insurers should make the kind of culling of 75% of their websites that the UK Government is discussing, but the principle is sound and relevant to Insurance. Insurers should ask themselves how many websites they are running, are they all equal in cost and could any of the services be merged onto cheaper platforms.
In these cost constrained times, it’s key that insurers not only examine core systems for possible cost savings, but also the ecosystem of ancillary applications and servers running the enterprise.
This blog has been reprinted with permission from
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