(Image credit: Dollar Photo Club.)
Marketing auto insurance in the workplace is already a $1 billion-plus business for MetLife Auto & Home, but the carrier expects significant growth through its recently launched Xcelerate online sales platform. Accessible as either part of the benefits enrollment process or in a separate session undertaken by an employee, Xcelerate can bind an auto policy within two minutes. The insurer launched the platform in Nov. 2014 in Illinois, Missouri, Indiana and Kentucky. By September Xcelerate will be available in all states except Alaska and Hawaii, though New Hampshire won’t be added until 2016.
Scott Kuczmarksi, SVP, MetLife Auto & Home.
Xcelerate’s speed is enabled by avoiding the traditional process of asking employees dozens of questions about their cars, household drivers, driving experience or coverage levels. Instead, the Xcelerate interface asks for the employee’s consent to access publicly available information needed to calculate premium. The employee is then required to confirm his or her information—drivers and vehicles—and the cost for the premium is generated automatically.
MetLife Auto & Home has been marketing in the worksite for 30 years, but the Xcelerate platform enables the inclusion of the auto insurance shopping option within the benefits enrollment process, according to Scott Kuczmarksi, senior VP, MetLife Auto & Home. “It all came from a question: ‘How can we know if we’ll get a significant uptick in our accounts if we get on the enrollment ballot?’,” Kuczmarski relates.
The Xcelerate software application can be offered to consumers through their employers directly, or through their payroll third-party administrators (TPAs), according to Kuczmarksi. Employers gain from including the auto insurance option on the benefit ballot because of the perceived value to customers, he says. Inclusion of the option doesn’t increase employer benefit cost, but it does enhance employees’ satisfaction and loyalty by giving them access to insurance at a competitive rate.
Xcelerate’s three-step process. Source: MetLife Auto & Home.
The rates that MetLife is able to offer employees are driven in part by the low administrative costs of binding the business. “Through the call center approach, you have to ask 100 questions—call centers spend half the time collecting data,” Kuczmarski elaborates. “Employees love this option because it’s less of a hassle and they save money.”
Cost, Convenience and Confidence
The philosophy behind the Xcelerate is one of “cost, convenience and confidence,” according to Kuczmarski. “It’s easy to underestimate the importance of the ‘confidence’ piece,” he insists. We’ve done pilots with similar functionality, and customers felt that the proposition was too good to be true and bolted. I think this is where the MetLife brand plays an important role: people see us as financially strong, and the employer endorsement adds to the confidence that inspires.”
When employees don’t bite when offered the auto insurance option on the benefits ballot, MetLife Auto & Home follows up outside that process. “If they balk on the ballot, we use email campaigns to say that we’ve got a customized price waiting for them and they can purchase a policy at any time,” Kuczmarski explains.
MetLife Auto & Home began building the Xcelerate capabilities in the first quarter of 2014, Kuczmarski reports. “We did a great deal of survey work to refine the concept, assembling user groups before developing prototypes,” he says. “We worked on what we initially thought would be most convenient, getting some things right, some wrong, and launched after several months of user feedback.”
New Way of Doing Business
It’s too early to disclose specifics, Kuczmarski insists, but he says that initial results are promising. “It wouldn’t surprise me if the majority of business came through this channel in the future,” he says. “At least with regard to employees getting exposed to us and then being prepared for a follow up call or email. It’s becoming the way we do business: having the ability not to have to ask questions of customers but rather just verifying data.”
Auto insurance is uniquely suited to this kind of insurance quoting Kuczmarski acknowledges, but he doesn’t rule out using the same process for other lines of business. “Auto is the furthest along when it comes to the reliability and coverage of third-party data,” he notes. “In the case of auto, we looked at our rating algorithm and asked which questions we couldn’t answer from third-party data. I turned out that very few questions can’t be independently verified. The data isn’t currently as robust for the data needed for homeowners’ rating, but it might be possible in the future.”