Systems: Direct Marketing and Lead Management

Direct Marketing in Life Insurance (in Asia at least) largely tends to come down to telemarketing. Either inbound in response to TV home shopping/commercials, or outbound to database lists obtained from sponsors.

The segment does not seem to be well served on the systems side, either in the planning or monitoring activities. Generic lead management tools are available, however event these are not well suited to insurance sales. The call center is better served, unsurprisingly since there are many vendors focused on call centers.

Planning/Monitoring
One solution that comes close on the execution side is Aprimo (http://aprimo.com/). This tool is focused on the sales process, with some functionality around campaign planning. It has inbuilt workflow definition and management tools, which are used to execute lead-level followup.

However the key lack (and in most/all other systems) is the profitability planning capabilities when it comes to insurance-product sales. The problem is that an insurance sale creates an annuity - an ongoing revenue stream. The sale is only profitable when you take into account the stream of premiums received over months and years. Tools like Aprimo's assume each sale is a lump sum amount.

An insurance planning tool needs to be able to evaluate how long it will take for the campaign to break even, which requires the system to model the spend and cash inflows over an extended period. There do not appear to be a wealth of options available in this area, and most insurance companies that do anything on this tend to use spreadsheets.

The downside of this approach is the restricted ability to monitor actual experience against the plan and projections. And if you don't know whether the campaign is profitable, how can you decide whether to continue, ramp up, or even stop?

Lead Management
Databases of customers and potential customers need to be sanitised, filtered, and passed to call centers for action. This tends to be fairly basic work, if tedious. Many organisations seem to rely on in-house systems, perhaps reflecting the custom nature of the data sources. A fairly simple set of database and query tools will usually suffice to load data from sponsors, perform the de-duplication checks, and re-extract data for passing to the call center.

For web-based sales channels (much discussed but not overly effective by nature), tools like Aprimo provide the ability to manage and in some cases automate parts of the sale process. Leads are captured in the internal database, and eventually the sale is passed to the back-office systems. The challenge here will be to retain the less-structured data that is captured during the sale process.