Competitive analysis of online life insurance providers

In order to meet the demand for superior customer experience within the evolving insurance industry, our client – a US-based life and health insurance firm – wanted to gain competitive insights about online insurance providers. Netscribes carried out a competitive analysis of all the client’s competitors, which included:

• the questions asked during the application process,
• traffic sources,
• time to generate a quote online,
• company profiling and competitor underwriting analysis, and more.

Objective

With consumers increasingly turning to the internet to purchase insurance, a leading life and health insurer in the US wanted to understand how it was positioned against its competitors online. It wanted Netscribes to analyze its competitors’ websites, direct carriers, aggregators, brokers and non-life insurers selling life insurance online via partners.

Solution

• Netscribes analysed each type of competitor, i.e. direct carriers, aggregators, brokers and non-life insurers, against two key factors — traffic and product
• Traffic analysis: This included studying the insurance providers based on parameters such as page views and number of visitors via channels such as paid and organic search, referrals, direct, social, e-mail, display ads, among others
• Product analysis: This included a study of the key indicators for a term insurance product, such as the number of underwriting questions, sum assured, coverage, types of term plans, and value added services like live chats and educational material
• Each competitor was scored by benchmarking their performance against key traffic and product metrics
• A final score was calculated to measure the overall performance of the insurance providers (for brokers, aggregators and direct insurers separately) and plotted the results on a bubble chart with traffic and product scores on X-axis and Y-axis, respectively

Approach

We conducted the study using both primary and secondary research.

• Primary Research: This step involved identifying the industry experts, developing interview questionnaires, and conducting in-depth telephonic and web interviews with the identified respondents. Interviews were conducted to understand the market dynamics, determine market penetration rate and vehicle sales, and estimate the adoption and cost of semi-active suspension technologies.
• Secondary Research: Data gathered via primary research was validated by secondary research. Identification and cross-verification of the inconsistencies in data sets were done. Moreover, Netscribes identified the market drivers, barriers, and challenges; provided geography-specific market assessment; devised adaptability metrics; and tracked competitor strategies.

Results delivered

Netscribes delivered traffic and product analysis reports, as well as an overall performance benchmarking report for each type of competitor i.e. aggregators, brokers, and direct insurers.