Riding the Whirlwind

Strategic Interactive Marketing for the Insurance Industry

Key Points:

Customers should be given a choice of mediums. This needs to reflect their ownership of the mediums, the time and place where they wish to communicate, the preferred type of user interface, how they approach tasks, and their cognitive thinking skills.

6.6 Support Customer Preferences and Choices

6.6.1 When deciding which medium to use, where possible customers should be given a choice. Factors deciding the choice of medium include:

• ownership of the mediums: simple or sophisticated; one or multiple; current and future.
• time of use: early morning, day or lunch-time, evening, nights or week-ends.
• place of use: at home, work, in a hotel, on the move in the UK or abroad.
• user interface: human or machine; voice, keyboard, keypad or touch operated (plus support for those with disabilities).
• task approach: process or people oriented, instant or considered decision making, machine or real world metaphor.
• cognitive thinking: logical, analytical, literacy and numeracy skills.

Factors influencing customer's choice of medium

The customers' processing and storage capability need to be taken into account when designing any service.

- Information Bandwidth -

6.2.2 There is also a need to take into account the information bandwidth and storage capability of the customer's device as well as the complexity of the transactions. For example:

• detailed portfolio information cannot be sent to a simple pager but could be sent to a PDA, a PC, or a kiosk with a printer. Alternatively, a pager could receive the name and price of an investment whose price has moved outside customer set limits, and then the customer could respond with a hold, sell, or buy.

6.2.3 The aim is to make the customer's view transparent, seamless, easy to use and flexible