Tower Insurance recently overhauled its quoting process for personal insurance products, and the new system now pulls information from publicly available sources and removes questions that customers have found “difficult to answer.”
MD direct Michelle James said the move is part of Tower’s ongoing push to automate its systems where possible, and to make use of data analytics to “meet the 21st century head on” with digital tools.
Commenting on the new process, James said it pulls from public records on housing, construction and property types, and eliminates the need for customers to have all of the often-complex information to hand.
“Tower is currently sourcing data automatically from external provider CoreLogic for information on houses that we would normally have to ask the customer about,” James said.
“This includes publicly available information, such as the year a house was built, construction details like roof materials, and how many bedrooms the home has. Over the next couple of months, we plan to bring in information from publicly available sources such as Land Information New Zealand (LINZ).
“This will enable us to avoid asking the question “what type of property do you have?” because the LINZ data will automatically give us information like the title of the property and section size, which will tell us whether they are a body corporate, a lifestyle block or freestanding.”
James noted that some insurers still ask customers over 60 questions to get a policy quoted and approved. Tower’s process now narrows that down to just eight questions, and James said the process does not compromise the accuracy of the final quote.
“Tower has discontinued asking some questions that customers have told the insurer they find difficult to answer, such as, ‘where do you park your car?’, ‘how many years of experience does the driver have?’, ‘what type of property do you have?’ or ‘do you have a working house alarm?’,” James said.
“Customers have told us they have to stop and think about where they park, which adds time and can sometimes be confusing, so we’ve decided to keep things as simple as possible for customers.”
“Customer feedback has been incredibly positive since we started the quick quote process,” she added.
“Our customers really appreciate the ease in process and we’re seeing this reflected in both positive customer feedback and conversion.”
