In addition, for those who are in the market for car insurance, instant online quote services can be accessed through their iPhones.
Brief Background
Esurance is the Johnny-Come-Lately of the insurance industry; the company was founded in 1998 and began selling direct car insurance policies to individuals the following year. Its status as a small, independent insurer was short-lived; since the turn of the century it has been a subsidiary of the White Mountains Insurance Group, a large conglomerate.
Esurance management prides itself on being environmentally friendly, using “carbon offsets” for its offices and offering completely paperless customer transactions and filings.
Will other auto insurance providers follow suit? Many have already been running some hard competition to Esurance, though Esurance so far is the first and only insurer to offer comprehensive car insurance services online through an iPhone application.
Hartford Given Top Marks
While Esurance’s iPhone access is innovative, the Hartford Financial Services Group, a Connecticut-based company and one of the nation’s larger insurers, recently got the top rating for its online services. In a June article, published in Business Wire, it was reported that Hartford’s web site was the most user-friendly and persuasive of the top seventeen insurance company web sites surveyed. Insurance web sites were also evaluated based on content quality and how often it was used by those on social networking web sites such as Facebook and MySpace.
The company that did the survey, Change Sciences, Inc., also gave highly favorable reports on the web sites of Liberty Mutual, Progressive, Nationwide, GEICO, and State Farm, among others. What was interesting is that Esurance, which pioneered online insurance services, came in at Number 8; the top seven are old, established “traditional” insurance companies that have had some catching up to do when it came to establishing a presence on the World Wide Web.
Of course, the ultimate winner in this race is the insurance consumer, for whom insurance shopping has become easier than ever. As far as online insurance has come however, it’s not perfect; the Change Sciences report indicated that over three-quarters of the insurance company websites surveyed “fail to answer at least one question that users have,” while nearly three-fifths have “instances of navigation design that pose challenges” – and all of them came up a bit short in providing “persuasive” content in some way.
