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Focus Technology Award - First Prize
Can Technology change the Insurance Broking World?
The short answer is 'Yes'. Technology has already changed the broking world. Without technology and digital transmission systems, store and forward email, plus interactive web sites, thriving broker companies such as Medibroker Online would not exist. All our enquiries come via the World Wide Web (or by phone to us). We have never cold called and never used direct mailing shots in the four years since the launch of Medibroker Online. Yet we receive over 2000 online completed new enquiries every month, employing some seventeen staff and sub contractors at our Whitley Bay Virtual Offices.
The key to the use of technology is first to understand conventional marketing, product distribution, and sales techniques. We need to understand Broker/Insurance company relationships and how effective and efficient these presently are. What is the image of insurance and financial institutions in the Public mind?
The vast majority of the Public strongly distrust financial service companies and insurance companies in particular. Products and plans are 'push sold' by sometimes aggressive techniques, driven by high front-end commissions and direct marketing techniques. Client service and broker service seems to have worsened in recent years with some insurers having great difficulty servicing their existing books of business, with ever demanding clients wanting both transparency, speed of service, choice and low premiums. Conventional insurance marketing and distribution is inefficient and in the main, companies have been buying their business for years, or poaching from each other. |
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Clients WILL deal with people they never see or meet. Medibroker Online is a perfect example as we have written well in excess of 2000 contracts of business since launch, covered some 6000 lives by a big range of healthcare plans, across the UK and fifty other countries around the world. By organic expansion alone, we now deal with in excess of 2000 client new enquiries every month. None of these are solicited calls or direct marketing emails or enquiries. They are telephone enquiries, referrals or requests made at our web sites, where full client details have been filled on simple lead forms. |