Personalising your insurance website makes the quote journey magical for customers and boosts sales. It should be easy .... but only a few insurers are doing it, and they are generating much higher sales than competitors as a result.In this blog, I look at why customers don't like the traditional insurance purchase process and want it to be personalised. At Optalitix, we offer technology to our clients that personalises insurance quotes, and we have seen our clients' sales increase by 10% to 50% as a result.

Why is the insurance quote drop out rate so high?

People are impatient. They are used to Google or Amazon where they can do their search and find exactly what they want with almost no effort. Yet when it comes to insurance, we treat all our customers the same and throw barriers in their way. We force our customer to answer difficult questions:

• What product should I choose?
• What is the right benefit level?
• Why do I have to put so much information on the quote form?
• How do I answer all these complex underwriting questions?

Behavioural economists tell us that people prefer not to think when making a purchase, and buying insurance requires a lot of thought. As a result, they delay their insurance purchase until a better time (often never). When they do apply online, they frequently drop out of the web process and seek human advice, resulting in web conversions that look awful. Insurers then believe that the online channel doesn't work for insurance. Well, online does work (this is the internet age, after all), it's how people want to buy everything, including insurance, they just don't like the current one size fits all approach for selling insurance!

A personalised web journey is like magic

There is so much data about customers available - what they like, what products they buy, how they want to be buy - that real personalisation can become a magical experience. The old corner store where the owner knew you and exactly what you wanted is back, and is available online. The best websites will use hundreds of data points and algorithms to personalise your experience without you even realising it.For example, Google knows what you are searching for based on your location, the context of your request, what other, similar people have asked for, and lots of other data items. There are at least 20 visible algorithms running on Google in addition to the basic search algorithm that gives your search answer (there are probably even more running in the background), That's magic, but we are so used to it these days that it has stopped amazing us - until we step into a traditional insurance journey and are forced to think again.

Insurers can create magic too

Insurers have access to the most amazing data on their customers - from external sources, and their own internal data on applicants and customers. This data, when combined with smart algorithms, can create a magical experience for customers in real time. In an instant, as the applicant passes the first screen in the quote process, they can provide the answers to all of these questions:

• What is the best product to offer this customer?
• What is the value of the sale to our business, and the likelihood of it happening?
• What is the best channel (online / telephone / broker / email / post)?
• What is the most appropriate marketing messages to display?

We can help you make magic

So why don't insurers create a personalised customer journey? The reason is the variety of skills required to make it happen. You need the database and system skills to get the data into the process (quote data, as well as other internal and external data), the analytical skills to give the data meaning (see data analytics), the website and marketing skills and system capability to run the models in real time, and the ability to monitor the impact and make the models learn from past experience.Optalitix provides these skills in our custom built platform that allows our clients to focus on the website development and sales, with the web personalisation and insights provided via Optalitix API's. The personalisation process is quick to set up, and all the monitoring and maintenance systems are hosted by Optalitix. (See AI for insurance for more information).So there's no reason to hold back - get ready to boost your sales and personalise your customers' experience.Dani Katz