Teach What, But AlsoTeach Why

The other day, I spent some time with a couple of new sales folks in my company. I was reviewing one of our products called WebFSC as we're starting a new campaign around it. I didn't have a plan for what to cover, I wanted to see how much they new about it. They had gone through some training and review already.

So when I asked them to tell me about it, they dutifully regurgitated a description of the key features that it had and how a customer might use it. And that was pretty good. Not all sales folks even take that step of knowing what or how, rather relying on improvisation.

Unfortunately, what I didn't hear was "why." Why a customer needs this product and why it is valuable. Immediately that is where I took the discussion. I reviewed very little of the product, in fact, over the course of the hour. But, what I was able to provide was context about the customer, the industry and the reality of the marketplace. I was able to help them understand why this product is important to customers.

As a result, they are now better equipped to help the customer how they can use the product to improve productivity and why they should. At the end of the day, mechanics are one thing. Helping a customer to understand the value in a solution is the real trick.

ACORD 2010

Early last week, I attended the ACORD/LOMA 2010 conference. I had never attended one before even though I've been in the insurance industry for quite some time. What is ACORD/LOMA? In short, ACORD is the technical standards body for the insurance industry and LOMA is composed of the training folk who help technologists learn insurance domain knowledge.

This year, the conference was held in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay casino.The facility is top notch and Vegas is certainly a city that's all about the convention. The only negative is that it's a 15 minute commute by foot between the rooms and the convention area. Beyond that, the food was good and the staff pleasant.


As to the show itself, it was a nice blend of sessions for the agency, the carrier and vendors. While it had the tendency to become commercialized at times (what show isn't?), it still was chock-full of topics and issues that are helpful to me in my role as a product manager. The show didn't have an obvious theme, though I was surprised at how much the larger vendors have moved into the insurance space. I'm familiar with all the various insurance vendors, but now joining the effort are the household names such as Microsoft, Oracle and HP. Each of these were platinum providers and are clearly starting to pay attention to the insurance vertical.


Other items of note are a continued emphasis on the standards we know and love, such as ACORD XML, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and the move of services to the cloud. Microsoft was intensely emphatic about the latter and freely mentioned their Azure platform, Sharepoint 2010 and the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform.


I am not sure where all of this will lead, but I hope to attend next year's conference to continue to see how the industry looks to evolve.

The Next Generation of Insurance Tool, or a Solution in Want of a Problem?

I read an article yesterday on Insurance Networking News about how a company felt that the emergence of the iPad would be a jump start to drive electronic or e-signatures with insurance agents. Now, I'm a huge proponent of technology sometimes for technology's sake alone, but in this case I couldn't disagree more.

First of all, the iPad doesn't support a pen interface. The article references the ability to "click to sign" but why would that be ok? If I'm sitting across from someone, why wouldn't I want to get an actual signature captured?  E-signatures have their place, but to me, they are a compromise. Why not do it right? The technology out there today, mostly PC tablets, already support a pen interface and can capture signatures just as you might do at millions of point of sale terminals all over this nation.

Second of all, the article cites limited internet connectivity as an issue that has limited acceptance of the tablet solution. How does the iPad address issue exactly? Sure, there are models with AT&T 3G built in, but  coverage on AT&T's network is hardly ubiquitous. On a regular tablet PC your choice of carriers are only a USB device away.

Third, the iPad, for all that I love it, is NOT a good device for heavy data entry. At minimum, an agent will want to create a quote or fill out an application and the iPad without a regular keyboard is not a good way to do that. Of course you can argue that you can add a keyboard to an iPad, but aren't you just buying a standard tablet in two pieces? 

I'm sure that there are other reasons for purchasing the solution mentioned in the article, but it seems like a solution in want of a problem at this point.

Is There an App for That?

I was asked yesterday whether my company would consider creating an application for the iPad. Our flagship application is a product that produces insurance rates for an insurance agent that they can easily compare and provide to a customer looking for insurance. It is called a comparative rater. Information is entered once about a person including their cars or their home and then insurance quotes are produced from potentially hundreds of companies.

But, I digress. Back to the question. Would we produce an application like this for a mobile device? Our application relies on really heavy data entry. Each year, in fact, insurance companies seem to need additional information in order generate quotes. The best way to navigate through such a set of requirements (at least right now) is a keyboard and mouse. In addition, our comparative rating ecosystem relies upon integration with other systems to exchange data. Many of those do not, and will not live on a mobile platform because they are designed for a local workgroup environment. Lastly, in order to perform actions like verifying an address, looking up a car by a VIN and producing and submitting rates to a carrier, you need solid Internet connectivity. 

Certainly, the latter issue seems to less and less of an issue as our wireless networks mature, but my final reason for not building an app for that? If you need portability now, you can have it. A netbook with a data plan or a laptop tethered to smartphone or an aircard gets the job done right now. You keep all the functionality of the current products that are in your life - you just get to take it with you. Our product costs do not go up and everyone's life stay simpler.

That's not to say that we aren't looking at ways to move our solutions to the cloud or provide read-only access for mobile devices. It's just that the mix of functionality and productivity in our current solutions are not directly a good fit for these emerging platforms. We'll be keeping a close eye on them though.