In January 2015, Insurance Journal announced Google’s intention to introduce online insurance companies at some point in the first quarter of 2015. Yes, they did. There is no delay in this. Why in the world must a technology-advanced company investigate a quiet company like an insurance company? Of course, they have other, much cooler ways to spend their heaps of money. Like developing Msn and yahoo watches or robot car wash machines for use with their robot cars.
Msn and yahoo have a lot of money and a lot of wise people, they don’t get into this business even if – there’s something more behind it. To be sure, Msn and yahoo have logged many dive right into new ventures, only to end it later. Good examples are Msn and yahoo Video; Msn and yahoo never had the ability to get any handles, so they just bought You Tube instead (Msn and yahoo Buzz and Msn and yahoo Wave were a popular victim pair).
Msn and Yahoo are not only trying to anticipate the future, they are making a sizeable financial investment to get out before then. Prognostication is a challenging business, sometimes you get it wrong. But when you do it right, the rewards can imply total market supremacy, as in search, pay-per-click, or online video clips. This is Google’s community to take big risks, agree to big losses … and money in also greater success.
So again, why insurance companies? It is interesting that Msn and yahoo introduced the efforts of insurance companies following online airline tickets and the contrasting efforts of tracing resort rates. Msn and yahoo will display airfare and room rates along with various other search results pages for the search. Before they started doing this, the search results page revealed a tedious list of blue backlinks to websites like Priceline and Resorts.com and it took another click and a bit of entering before the real price contrast was shown.
The more experienced individuals among us will remember the good old days, when real travel agencies, many of which were local companies, made travel and resort arrangements for us. Almost at night, their numbers dwindle to the point of disappearing, when ‘virtual’ travel agencies begin to appear. And after that browse titans into the video game. That hasn’t made Priceline or Resorts.com irrelevant yet, but it should make them sweat again.
To be sure, the insurance business, with its specific rules to navigate, complex plan forms and scores, and those financing points, make simple premium evaluations much more difficult than contrasting room rates or travel rates. Therefore, in the insurance company business, there are more opportunities to include worth buying offers and solutions. But are we really worth it? And what are our customers really worth?
Obviously, Msn and yahoo believe that having the ability to have choice is an insurance buyer’s value.* For those of us who think having a variety of companies to choose from differentiates our insurance company from other options, this may be finally a wake-up call.
Are Msn and yahoo wise enough to display a significant level of contrast based on an arbitrary searcher’s choices and needs? Maybe. Information is out there, all it takes is money to get it up and running, and Msn and yahoo have a lot of it. Whether Msn and yahoo will try to crack the code or vice versa and whether this attempt remains to be seen. But it’s really not worth the risk of waiting to see. Now is the time to question the value we include for insurance company customer connections and ensure that we raise the bar for affordability for online gamers by incorporating consultative solutions that robotics will find difficult to replicate…at least in the near future. call.
