Mobile Tools - Nascent Technology for the Taking
Insurance Networking News, December 1, 2008
As the throng of baby boomers, ages life and annuity insurers, asset managers, financial consultants and banks are competing aggressively for the retirement market.
The mobile sales tools being used by these groups vary widely, from wireless dictation and transmission that document time-sensitive information or events, to using a smartphone as a portal to enterprise applications.
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Although considered by some in the industry as an oxymoron, the use of mobile devices and CRM functionality is on the rise. In 2006, Gartner Inc., Stamford, Conn., accurately forecast continued strong annual growth in mobile CRM across all verticals, predicting 40% to 60% in sales growth over the next two to three years. And Gartner reports that its conversations with life insurers and agents during the last three years reveal that adoption of the technology has steadily increased.
Yet a host of factors, such as the economy, M&A activities, culture, security and increased regulatory scrutiny, seem to be holding insurers back from fully realizing mobile technology as a business enabler, and as a chief way to approach the retirement market.
"Security concerns and a comprehensive vision about how these devices could be used tend to stall insurers with captive and independent sales forces alike," says Steve Leigh, principal research analyst with Gartner, in a recent report.
Although insurers see the promise of delivering via mobile devices the analytics and associated customer intelligence that can be fed into customer relationship management (CRM) and other business applications, the prospects of getting such an initiative underway are daunting, even to the largest carriers.
Rachel Alt-Simmons
Rachel Alt-Simmons, senior analyst, insurance, with TowerGroup Inc., Needham, Mass., notes that there has been some pullback on mobile initiatives as carriers face a rough economy. "Think of how much disruption in the economy has meant to the channel with the changes at Bank of America, Washington Mutual and other banks that also sell life insurance and other retirement products," she says. "These companies are figuring out how they'll merge, acquire, etc. and what that means for distribution."
THE BUSINESS CASE
Making the business case for field sales force use of the mobile devices themselves seems an easy enough sell. However, it should include a vision of "what could be," notes Igor Glubochansky, director of industry solutions at AT&T's lab in Redmond, Wash. Glubochansky holds that insurers are moving from technology such as present day GPRS (General Packet Radio Service that provides data rates from 56 up to 114 kbit/s) to UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System, a third-generation (3G) mobile network designed to provide global mobility with a wide range of services including telephony, paging, messaging, Internet and broadband data).
"We can connect anywhere at any-time with more bandwidth," says Glubochansky. "So imagine an agent in the field trying to explain a complex life or annuity product to a client," he says. "Using UMTS, the agent 'calls' an expert over video-conference to explain the nuances of the product/service and answer questions. This expert can take control of the agent's TabletPC (or laptop) to run simulations, push documentation, etc."
Telecom providers are not the only organizations investing in mobile networks. In June, Infosys Technologies Ltd., a Bangalore, India, provider of outsourcing technologies to the insurance industry, was granted a patent by the U.S. Patents and Trademark Office that has nothing to do with its traditional business offerings. The patent covers the technology that makes a mobile network appear seamlessly connected, even when the underlying technologies and their related distinctiveness, is altered.
And as networks become more sophisticated, mobile devices become more prolific. Furthermore, from the mobile device perspective, cost is not a big consideration, notes Alt-Simmons. "It's considered a have-to-have," she says. "But the applications being rolled out to the devices are driving some of the costs, because it's forcing insurers to take a top-down view of corporate objectives, and evaluate what's best for the organization and to its distribution functionality, so the initiative becomes larger when you view it this way."
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