Hospitals and health systems have been spending more on advertising in recent years, with an emphasis on educating patients and engaging them in their growing role as healthcare consumers. But there are sharp debates among healthcare providers and marketing experts about how to present advertising in responsible and ethical ways, the consumer value of most current marketing materials, and whether to continue relying on traditional mass-market [...]
Taking our special report on mobile a bit further, let's discuss a longstanding issue facing insurers today: attrition rates. While some companies like USAA and Amica pride themselves on longstanding customer relationships (10 years + is considered outstanding), the average customer switches insurers every 2.5 years. Given that mobility increases customer knowledge and convenience, insurers have legitimate concerns about it also increasing customer attrition. A significant [...]
More direct sales are likely as insurers offer convenient transactions and services via mobile. To the extent that mobile brings insurers closer to policyholders, it raises the issue of “disintermediation”—a direct business model that takes intermediaries, such as agents, out of transactions—a model that has already been realized to a significant extent in personal lines property insurance and some types of individual life insurance. More direct [...]
USAA, a San Antonio, Texas-based insurer and financial-services company that serves military personnel, has become a leader in customer-facing mobile capabilities because of its need to reach its clients when they are deployed. Today, mobile is USAA’s largest contact channel, reporting 590 million interactions during 2013. By contrast, its website logged 350m interactions and its voice-response system received 110m calls, according to Neff Hudson, the company’s [...]
In this special edition of Shop Talk we will explore how mobile technologies are transforming the insurance industry. The “anytime, anywhere” interactions that mobile enables are allowing a new level of intimacy in the insurer-policyholder relationship with the potential to change the insurance game. This special report explores how insurers can become trusted partners who provide valuable new services that help policyholders identify and assess risks [...]