Title: Term Plan - Insurance Industry players go online Reluctantly
1Term Plan
2Insurance Industry players go online Reluctantly
3- From the year 2000 onwards, the Indian insurance
industry saw a number of private players entering
through the gates thrown open by the government.
Public sector player LIC had already gained an
edge by being a pioneer in the life insurance
space. - With an army of agents, LIC was way ahead of
these latecomers and found itself settled
comfortably. - It was evident that LIC relied heavily on its
strong agent base. The latecomers, in their
struggle to make a mark in the newly opened
insurance market, followed suit. It was a
herculean task for these private players to ape
the insurance giant and more than a decade later,
they still find themselves striving to gain
substantial market share. - Getting exceptionally good agents on board,
training them, retaining existing agents has been
a constant struggle faced by the industry as a
whole. The industry also explored other
distribution channels like brokers, corporate
agents and bancassurance but is still constantly
being haunted by profitability issues.
4- PRODUCT SIMPLIFICATION AND DESIGNFor starters,
companies must focus on designing simple and
easy-to-understand products. Some policies that
exist in the markets today are so complex that
even a fairly financially literate person would
not be able to fully understand it. For some
strange reason, instead of working on designing
simpler products, the industry has and continues
to depend on intermediaries to sell their
complicated products. This activity is
self-defeating and extremely expensive. - The innovations, if any at all, are trips to
Paris instead of Colombo or Goa, for the
top-performing intermediary. Wait for a couple of
years and we could see incentives like a trip on
Richard Bransons space flight. - A century ago someone said that Insurance is
Sold and not Bought. It is a Push Product
and not a Pull Product. Design a complicated
and opaque product and make it available only
through limited expensive channels and yes, it
will always be a Push Product. - So what products do we need Very Simple, Easy
to Understand, Easy to Explain Easy to Buy. - Coming to the Easy to Buy part going by
industry reports, an online term policy is now
sold once every 8 minutes. And consumers are now
getting covers of a crore rupees and more
something unthinkable a few years ago. - The process and the interface should be designed
in such a way that Term Plan becomes easy to
understand and to buy. The user interface should
be customer-friendly and the payment process
should be smooth in order to entice customers to
transact online.
5- It should only take a few minutes for potential
buyers to sail through the entire process leading
to final sales. - The online platform can be a very powerful tool
as it is now being increasingly embraced by a
large section of society and is not only
restricted to the young. It might just be the
solution to the very expensive alternatives that
are being tried currently. - All it takes is a smart, aggressive player who
turns the tables to make it a success which
seems to the norm in most industries these days.
I am way too skeptical to buy a product from a
person who knows less about it than me and would
rather make my own decision. For me, the days of
push-marketing are over. - Source http//blogs.reuters.com/india-expertzone
/2011/11/23/insurance-industry-players-go-online-r
eluctantly/
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anz.com/Corp/term-insurance/isecure-insurance-plan
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