INSURANCE 2.0

An online community can be created with very little spending or a business can spend a half a million dollars and still not achieve traction. Its not technology which make engaging online communities, its the people and the business idea which unite people to share and air their veiws and thoughts. Insurance businesses are little slow at reacting to online trends and therefore haven’t caught with with times to have a social media strategy or create an online community to communicate more directly with their customers. If you are an insurance business and want to start your online community, this is how you should go about it.

Its important to ask yourself a few questions before you go spending millions into building a community:

• Why do I build a community?
• How can I make the community more engaging for its users?
• What features do I want available to the community users?
• What will be cost of building the community?
• How do I manage the community?
• Are there any competitors in insurance who already have build a community?
• How much time and resource is needed to launch the community

There are few ready made products like Ning which provide free platform and tools to build a robust online community. Even wordpress has several community builder plugins to establish a low cost online insurance community. Advantage of going with a free tool is you can spend your time and resources to think of business idea of running the community and customising the look and feel of the community rather than developing it from scratch.

Here are some important driving forces to manage your insurance community once you have decided to launch it.

Hire a community specialist resource

This resource will act as a member of community and make sure the brand is not being misused and violated. They will also look after the interests of the community and manage it from spam, banned topics and act as a host to the community.

Identify active community participants

Once a community is launched you need to tap into the active promoters of your insurance brand and set your strategic objectives with them so they can bring more people into the community. Doing this is tough withing the insurance space.

Manage your audience expectations with right content

Content is key success factor of community. Your audience needs coming back to the site for new content. If you are launching a new insurance product or changing existing ones, its good to take your audiences veiws online and engage them in the discussion. You can call it crowdsourcing.

User-Generated content should be promoted

Make it very easy for users to publish content easily and effectively. It adds new content on your site every day which is excellent for your SEO strategy and also it keeps your readers engaged with your updates.

The biggest challenge for an insurance business is the idea behind launching an online community. I leave that to you to think as that’ll be giving away too much.

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The iPhone has revolutionised the mobile phone market bringing together touch screen, GPS, Maps and many user friendly apps and features to make an iPhone user an iPhone addict. The iPhone has been proven as a success; not because its a great phone but because of the great variety of applications ranging from great games, guides, currency converters, and many other interactive features. Cheaper mobile contracts and unlimited mobile internet access are helping the mobile app usage boom. Its becoming increasingly important for insurance businesses to put their footprint on the mobile app space as there are more than 50,000 apps  available through the App Store.

Here are few ideas insure businesses should consider when launching their iPhone app.

Reduce Screen Clutter

iPhone has a limited screen size therefore its important to keep the app as clutter free as possible. Usability of the app is a key success factor. Users should be able to use this app without thinking.

Step by Step User Experience

Make sure you test your app user experience before launching the app. If you are planning to launch an Insurance Quote application which involves several steps, you should build one step per screen to make it simple and engaging for the user. You can use professional tools like Graffletopia to design your iPhone App wireframe or the actual design. You can customise your iPhone app user interface with bespoke backgrounds, title bars, buttons, selectors, and other iPhone UI elements.

You could also paper prototype the UI for your iPhone (see example below). Whether you take the route of whiteboard / paper prototyping or digital prototyping, either way you have to make sure that you keep the customers journey has the highest priority.

The Development Framework

There are two options of developing the framework; 1) web technology 2)Objective-C Which is the best approach depends on what you what to achieve from your iPhone app and how fast you want to deliver it. Web Technology: This is the easiest option using Html and JavaScript. It user the browser on the iPhone to run and is a fairly simple development. Objective-C: Though the language is full of brackets, Objective-C is the iPhone development language and the best choice to develop robust applications using all of iPhone’s inbuilt assets like GPS, Maps, Camera and more. As an insurance business you might want to manage your claims like capturing accident/incident pictures, then Objective-C should be the language of your choice.

Development Tools

You need to have the right tools to develop your insurance iPhone app. Membership with iPhone developer support would be useful to get all the help needed. You also need to have a Mac OS computer and latest version of iPhone SDK. For web based development you can use jQTouch. Last but not the least, you need an iPhone to test run your application.

Test your iPhone App

Run your iPhone app through usability tests using real iPhones so you can find out how the app is performing on real people with the real hardware. Apple is fussy about accepting apps with bugs, so if you want your insurance app to be a hit with the masses, make sure its properly tested. Follow the above guidelines and launch your Insurance iPhone app with success.

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Readers are overwhelmed with hundreds of articles about adoption of Web 2.0 for the insurance industry. Many businesses are not in a position both with Information Technology framework and customer mind set to implement web 2.0 strategies in their business, but are still about to do it because its COOL.

Web 2.0 technologies in the insurance industry may not be the key survival factor but definitely a key differentiator with competitors. Only problem is the risk of doing it. Any idea which involves crowds or network effects to run it might fall flat on its face if not done properly the first time.

There is a lot of hype about insurance 2.0 and what it can do for insurance businesses and their customers. There is a lot of research and evidence to back up the hype, but this hype has lead to high expecations which are unreasonable for many IT teams in insurance businesses. Diving into insurance 2.0 just for the hype and not backing it up with a sound business plan might turn out to be very expensive for the business in the long term.

A business case fit is critical between your web 2.0 strategy and your insurance business model. It’ll definitely suit already pureplay online only insurance business models like Youi and Swiftcover.

Insurance 2.0 is definitely the way forward but just dont do it because it’s cool.

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Since the millennium our lives have become more web dependant and it is not because of introduction of new technologies but more so because of big culture shift towards sharing information over the web. More and more people review products online, rate experiences online, buy online, track deliveries online, share photos online and share what they are upto in day to day lives online. Therefore there is a need to share more information and insurance businesses will require fulfilling this urge of their customers using multiple 2.0 mediums.

The main urges of insurance customer today can be fulfilled using the following technologies.

Urge #1 Open Communication

Social networking applications like facebook, twitter, community sites and blogs could be used to communicate with your customer base about topics which is difficult to explain in detail using normal web site brochureware.

Urge #2 Transparent and easy information

Mobile devices and mobile apps could be used by insurance businesses to transfer instant handy tools for customer to use when they need it urgently.

Urge #3 Interactivity

Insurance web sites should use more AJAX, rich media applications, Silverlight and more to improve user experience and make purchasing insurance over the internet more interesting for the user.

Insurance businesses need more social focus to target the Generation Y.

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The evolution of social media has proved that car insurance businesses dont need big marketing budgets to have an online success. There is nothing as a free marketing campaign but many smarter ways have arrived to capture the online audience.

Method #1 to reduce your Marketing Budget

Its important not to spend your entire budget into a single big idea. The risk is high if it goes wrong. Its critical not to put all your eggs in one basket, but to spread it in variations across few ideas. Invest in multiple ideas and put further investment only on ideas which are working well. The web allows you to track marketing campaign success more effectively than any other medium. Some campaigns need continuous optimisation do get a synergetic effect out of them.

Method #2 to reduce your Marketing Budget

The internet has several free resources to promote your brand using social media. Second Life, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube are some of the available platforms to promote your car insurance brand and communicate with your customers. There is no need to create your own online car insurance community when there are so many already platforms and networks available.

Method #3 to reduce your Marketing Budget

Blogging honestly about your marketing, your business initiatives, your charity initiatives, and also steps your take to cut yours costs which then gets transferred to your customers. Blogs are a very powerful medium for your car insurance to communicate all those messages which are not normally expressed in web site brochureware pages. Wordpress is a zero cost and low maintenance blogging platform.

Method #4 to reduce your Marketing Budget

Mobile phone apps are much better than investing in ads if done properly.  Car insurance brands could easily create a nice app based toolkit for the their customers, it could be anything from insurance quotes to claims to ewallet. Apps could also be about something different and with no direct association with insurance.

Method #5 to reduce your Marketing Budget

Investing in online user experience and online content gives much higher long term ROI. Once you bring in the customer on the site, the content has to be engaging to make the customer feel comfortable. Investing in content is also brilliant for your SEO intiative.

Any car insurance brand to follow the above will survive in these downturn and still be able to communicate with their core audience.

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