A UK insurance company is selling thousands of motor insurance policies through its interactive Web site, created with Java technology. In the site`s first six months, it generated 50 000 quotes for motor insurance and sold about 1 500 policies for Eagle Star.
Paul Davies, Director of Eagle Star Direct, says: "The Internet is an ideal proving ground for developing new marketing techniques and learning how to demonstrate our capability, pricing and different underwriting strategies. It will get us ready for interactive television and public kiosks.
"You need to be up to speed early with electronic commerce and its never more urgent than it is now."
Selling insurance through the Internet is a natural extension of Eagle Star`s telephone-based insurance selling, which has won more than half a million customers.
JavaScript, a version of the Java standard Internet programming language, is used to produce dynamic forms which change as they react to responses, with selection lists that make the quotation building process quicker. They suppress questions that become unnecessary in the light of previous answers and minimise the amount of information to be entered.
The lower overheads of such direct business means users are offered 15 percent discount on standard prices. They can choose to take out a policy using credit cards, with instant cover if required.
An insurance quotation can also be saved under a password to be retrieved later.
Paul Davies, Director of Eagle Star Direct, says: "We get a lot of people who`ll log on before they buy a car and get illustrative quotes.
"Customers on the Internet can input more cars and more options and obtain more `what if?` quotes than they can on the telephone. When people visit us on the Internet it might not be the time for them to buy, so the stored quote is a measure of value for us."
Eagle Star Direct has just extended their Net service to include travel insurance. Household policies will follow shortly. "We`ve created a relatively low-cost distribution channel that`s given us access to a new group of customers," Davies believes.
Share
Editorial contacts