Insurance.com Optimizes the Customer Experience, One Segment at a TimeInsurance.com Optimizes the Customer Experience, One Segment at a Time

There are about 100 million households in the US that purchase auto insurance. About 28 million of them shopped for a new policy last year, and some 18 million ended up switching providers, according to Forrester Research. Talk about customer churn!

Despite these jaw-dropping stats, it is possible to win customer loyalty in the huge, $164 billion auto insurance market. Just ask Dave Roush, president and CEO of Insurance.com, which has vaulted to the top of the online agency business in just six short years. The company is on track to sell 180,000 policies this year, thanks in large measure to what Roush describes as "a sustainable competitive advantage in business intelligence" that enables the company to "up-sell, cross-sell and create longstanding relationships."

Roush describes Insurance.com as the Orbitz of auto insurance because it's a site where consumers can get instant comparative quotes from more than a dozen carriers (just as Orbitz represents multiple airlines, hotel chains and car rental agencies). BI has been crucial to understanding all the data Insurance.com collects through its rate-quoting engine, but the key to putting that insight to work has been a customer experience management initiative that has reshaped the company's Web site, call center and other customer touch points.

Insurance.com's version of the silo problem (see "Do the Right Thing: Gain the Customer Experience Advantage Over CRM" ) has been the coexistence of its direct business (the Insurance.com site) and that of partner financial institutions and branded sites also managed by the company (accounting for 30 percent of its business). As the company grew, customers wound up obtaining multiple quotes on the same system. "We were treating these customers like three different people because there was no way to aggregate the data," explains Joe Singleton, IT Director. "We were living in a [Web] session-based world, but we needed to move to a customer-based view."

In 2006, the company embarked on a three-phase project with the goals of realigning the data architecture around customers (rather than Web sessions); creating a more granular, segmented approach to customer understanding; and integrating the new data architecture and CRM tools for more effective customer experiences at every touch point.

To develop a single view of customers, the company implemented DataFlux software for matching and consolidating customer records. It also upgraded from Microsoft SQL-bundled Data Transformation Services to Informatica ETL software. Analytics software from SAS was purchased to support fine-grained segmentation of the consolidated customer data.

The integration and analysis efforts yielded more than a hundred customer segments described by source, status in the rate-quote engine, detailed qualifying information and other variables (the company collects some 72 data points in the process of generating a quote). To make the most of each segment, Insurance.com is using three core "customer experience management" software components from Chordiant.

The Decision Manager component is used to automate multivariant tests of new Web interfaces, creative, workflows, site navigation and so on for each segment. "We started varying our landing pages based on the source of the visitor, whether that's Google, an e-mail retrieve, typing in Insurance.com, a direct-mail postcard response or another source," Singleton explains. "The problem was maintaining and analyzing so many different experiences, but Decision Manager lets us feed the data from the SAS models into the decision engine, and it optimizes for each segment, identifying the best experience for each group."

Decision Manager has eliminated up to 15 hours of programming work per week (handled by several database administrators) while dramatically increasing the ability to test new experiences. Singleton says optimizing by source has increased click-through rates anywhere from 5 percent to 25 percent, depending on the segment. Going beyond the landing page, the company plans to use Decision Manager to test banner ads, help text, marketing creative and navigation within the insurance quote process.

Chordiant's Marketing Director component has been deployed to help develop and support outbound communication strategies for specific segments. "We're just starting to use this tool, but we're starting to take a segmentation-based approach to e-mail campaigns based on the characteristics of each candidate." Those traits might include the original source of the customer (Google, Yahoo, etc.), their status in the rate-quote engine, records of policies already purchased and so on.

The third and perhaps most important Chordiant component implemented by Insurance.com has been the Foundation Agent Desktop, which replaced a home-grown CRM interface. Rolled out in late 2006 after three months of testing, the desktop has been a hit with contact center reps in large part because it's integrated with the company's telephony environment. "Now when a call comes in, we can match the caller ID to our customer database," says Singleton. "If there's a hit, we can display all the customer information before the agent even answers the phone. That saves about 10 to 20 seconds right up front collecting information, and there's enough data to know where the customer is in the sales process."

Telephony integration has also delivered "much cleaner data capture," says Singleton. "Now when we're doing the analytics on the back end, we know what actions were taken on every call, and we can tie all of our metrics together in term of talk time, insurance application status, quotes issued and so on. It's a very streamlined process that hooks right into agent follow-ups and call backs."

Given that Insurance.com is a selling machine that leaves the messy details of servicing policies to the carriers, it's not quite an exemplar of total customer experience management. Nonetheless, it's setting examples that plenty of one-size-fits-all marketers can follow.