New Lead Gen Explores Texting, AI and Networking

Aging insurance agents and the rapid growth of the online portions of the direct-to-consumer insurance distribution channel has many insurers rethinking lead generation and acquisition methods, a new report found.

How can insurers break from their old ways? A handful of lead generation technology companies may be able to help.

ApexChat’s chat service engages websites, captures additional leads and gathers detailed information for agents to close sales, said Aite Group industry analyst Samantha Chow.

“Unique to Apexchat is its mobile optimization,” Chow wrote in a just-published report. “It provides texting capabilities in addition to online chat.”

The Pleasanton, Calif., company reports an increase of 30 to 40 percent in the number of leads if a firm or an agency offers chat on its website.

As insurance distribution evolves into a mobile model, ApexChat’s approach helps agent-driven mobile sales and direct-to-consumer mobile sales, Chow wrote in her new report titled, “Lead Generation in Insurance: In Search of the Golden Leads.”

The widely circulated report explores an area of the industry that rarely gabs headlines yet remains critical to the growth in the number of insurance policies sold every year.

An (Artificial) Intelligent Conversation

Moving away from the texting world of mobile devices, Conversica uses artificial intelligence software to improve the quality of human conversation between a sales rep and a lad or a customer service rep and a customer.

The company’s software, AI Sales Assistant, reaches leads through email to engage in a “human-like conversation,” Chow wrote.

AI Sales Assistant relieves agents of the drudgery of chasing down leads and by 2018 the company wants to offer the ability to automate business conversations that now take place via email, text, online chat and social media.

“Conversica takes the grunt work out of the sales process by qualifying the lead and setting up the sale,” Chow said.

Lead times, time to sale and customer acquisition costs drop as agents concentrate on sales conversion instead of chasing leads.

Capturing the Lead Journey

Insurance leads don’t drop out of thin air. They follow a path, a story that ends in the sale of a policy or annuity.

Usually, insurance companies know very little about the leads, which they often buy for a few dollars each: where did leads originate from? How old were they? Were they exclusive? How likely were they to convert?

But luckily for insurers, a Pennsylvania-based company called Jornaya wants to track that journey to help insurers identify third-party leads, how much insurers want to pay for them and even identify fraudulent leads.

“We at Jornaya witness the lead event and we know how long consumer spent on the form and how long it took to complete,” said Jamie Pickles, general manager, Insurance, for Jornaya.

Tracking the journey helps weed out bad actors tempted to use leads in unauthorized ways, Pickles said.

Other lead-generation companies include data integration platform LeadCloud, lead assignment and prioritization company Lead Assign, social networking platform for life and health policyholders Life.io, and data analytics giants LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Transunion.

Fighting an In-House Mentality

The “outsiders” stand ready to upend the way insurance companies have approached lead generation, one where insurers rely on lists and stacks of leads, Chow said.

“Firms must get away from the self-made systems to advance their marketing lead-gen efforts,” Chow wrote.

Seventy-four percent of insurers report they purchase their leads in-house. Another 16 percent use outside organizations to manage lead-gen purchasing and 11 percent report generating leads in-house without buying leads, the report found.

More than half of companies (52 percent) report paying a set price for a lead, 16 percent reporting using a bid process where power is vested with the insurer, and 32 percent said they resorted to another lead purchasing strategy, the research found.

Only 37 percent of insurers report they can route and prioritize leads to specific agents or call centers, while 21 percent report the ability to rout leads without the ability to prioritize them, the report found.

The majority (53 percent) use internal analytics to support lead scoring while 37 percent use tools from outside vendors.

As many as 53 percent of insurers report storing leads in custom-built databases, even as the cost of data storage has dropped.

“Insurers like doing things on their own,” Chow said. “They want control. They don't want to give it to someone else.”

A Changing Landscape

Life insurers, who face stagnant policy count growth and low interest rates, are prepared to invest in better lead generation.

Compared with the past two years, 11 of 15 life insurers surveyed said they expect their lead-generation budgets to increase over the next year, the report found.

New opportunities to sell to clients aren’t lost on insurers as millions of individual buyers enter the insurance marketplace for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

Millions more – baby boomers – are coming off group plans and shopping for individual policies to supplement Medicare protection in retirement.

InsuranceNewsNet Senior Writer Cyril Tuohy has covered the financial services industry for more than 15 years. Cyril may be reached at cyril.tuohy@innfeedback.com.

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Cyril Tuohy is a writer based in Pennsylvania. He has covered the financial services industry for more than 15 years. He can be reached at cyril.tuohy@innfeedback.com.