Biggest Insurance Companies Keep Their Customers Waiting, Velocify Study Finds

LOS ANGELES, May 7, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Velocify, the market-leader in cloud-based intelligent sales automation software, today published its "Insurance Industry Online Buyer Experiences" study. Evaluating how effective sales representative response is by the largest insurance companies in the nation, including direct, independent and captive agents, the study revealed that online insurance buyers waited an average of 2.3 days to get a call from an agent, and nearly 40 percent never received a call. The result is significant waste in marketing and advertising spend by insurance companies, a poor buyer experience, and missed sales opportunities.  

"The largest insurance companies in the country spend billions of dollars each year to stand out from the crowd, however, this research shows they often fall flat once buyers show up," said Stuart Ganis, Director, Insurance Vertical at Velocify. "By failing to respond to prospects quickly and adequately, these large organizations not only miss opportunities to add new customers, but create an invitation for competitors to swoop in."

Other key findings of the study:

• Many insurance companies completely ignored buyers, with 39 percent of prospects never receiving a call back, 34 percent never receiving an email, and 17 percent being completely ignored.
• Most insurance companies leave inquiring prospects waiting. The average wait time for a phone call in response to a submitted online quote form was an astounding 2.3 days. Previous Velocify research found that placing an immediate call (within 60 seconds) can increase conversion by 391 percent.
• Insurance buyers wait for email response too. Surprisingly, given the relative ease of automating email responses to online inquiries today, the average email response by those studied was 22 hours after inquiry submission. Previous Velocify research has found that sending an initial email response within 20 minutes can increase conversion by 49 percent.
• Most insurance companies give up on an online insurance buyer too soon.  In the study, the average number of call attempts per lead was 1.45 and the average number of emails sent was 1.56 – previous Velocify research has found the optimal number of call attempts and email attempts to be between five and seven over the first 22 days.

"The lesson in this study for insurance companies of all sizes is that there's a big opportunity to improve response practices to online buyers," said Ganis. "An improved buyer experience and financial gains are in store for the firms that get it right."  

For its "Insurance Industry Online Buyer Experiences" study, Velocify reached out to 25 of the leading direct, independent and captive insurance companies, completing a minimum of five Web-based contact or quotation request forms for each company. Following the submission, Velocify measured various items, including the length of time until first responses were received and total number of contact attempts by phone and email, for 22 days.

The full report is available for download on Velocify's website at: velocify.com/InsuranceOBE. Individual reports of the companies studied are available to representatives of those companies by request.

For more information on Velocify, visit the company website and blog, or follow them on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube.

About Velocify
Velocify is a market-leading provider of cloud-based intelligent sales software, designed for high-velocity sales environments. Velocify helps sales teams keep pace with the speed of opportunity and increase revenue by driving rapid lead response, increased selling discipline, improved productivity, and actionable selling insights. The company has helped more than 1,500 companies across a variety of industries improve customer acquisition practices and sales performance.  Velocify was recently recognized as one of the fastest growing companies in North America by Deloitte and a Best Place to Work by the Los Angeles Business Journal.

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SOURCE Velocify