Best Practices in Making Complex Selling in Commercial Insurance an Experience

Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems

Joe Pine’s many books and speeches on how mass customization is more about creating exceptional customer experiences rather than just delivering services or products certainly is resonating in the commercial insurance arena.  Joe Pine has shown how product and services configuration as a contributing factor in mass customization strategies is also more about delivering experiences over just a bid, quote or policy in commercial insurance industry for example.

Complex Selling as an Experience

Of all the companies in the commercial insurance market, Geico continually illustrates how complex selling can be turned into an exceptional and memorable experience.  In addition, Geico continues to be one of the highest-rated commercial and personal insurers in the U.S. on customer satisfaction surveys completed by Forrester Research.  This is because the company concentrates on making each of the channels customers purchase through as usable, easily understood and helpful as possible. The Geico website has won awards for its ease of use as its bidding, estimating and quoting process has as well.

Geico has transformed commercial insurance in the process.  The lessons learned from how Geico has been able to make complex selling simplified are evident in the following lessons learned:

• Don’t be afraid to be creative and nonconformist in messaging. The Geico Gecko is now even more well known than comparable brand mascots in the insurance industry as are the cavemen.  One of their latest commercials is shown below.

• Focus on usability and streamlining the bidding, estimating and quoting process. For both commercial and personal insurance, the company has been successful with this aspect of their strategy.  They have in fact won awards for their website usability.

• Making the customer part of the experience is critical. Joe Pine discusses this in his books and also in the TED Talk you can view here.  Get the customer involved in the experience to assure customer loyalty over time.

Bottom line: Complex selling of commercial insurance needs to focus on creating an exceptional and memorable experience for customers to gain their loyalty and trust over time.  Geico gets it; they also accomplish all this and entertain too.

Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/21992612@N03/3486400930/

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