Endsleigh selects IBM Coremetrics to improve online sales

UK insurance provider Endsleigh has selected IBM's Coremetrics Web Analytics solution in a bid to improve its online sales. The web analytics tool tracks how long people spend on web pages, which pages they prefer and how effective the online application process for the insurer's products is. Endsleigh hopes this will help it to understand and respond to trends on its website and be better able to react to market demands.

David Pope, e-business analyst at Endsleigh, told Computing that competition in the insurance industry is fierce, and it therefore needed to ensure that the application process is smooth and simple for its customers.

"Coremetrics will give us the understanding of customer behaviour by identifying areas on the website which are prone to dropouts, and looking at customers who abandon the process after already getting to the checkout phase," he explained.

Pope said the software would also allow the insurer to measure how well it is presenting its products online.
Pope said the insurer picked Coremetrics out of the 10 different products it assessed because of "the scale and comprehensiveness of the solution and its commercial capabilities".
Pope said that IBM helped Endsleigh with its implementation and training.

"We engaged with IBM in a consultancy period to understand the best way of tagging the website in order to retrieve the right kind of information. IBM would then give our in-house IT department a method by which we implement the tags on the web pages," he explained.

"We had end user training to understand how to use the product, so that once the data is available to analyse, we can be effective in using it," he added.
The solution has gone live on the motor insurance part of the Endsleigh website and it will be applied to other product lines in a phased approach.

According to Pope, each part of the website could take a few months to install "depending on the complexity of the website and the complexity of tagging".
The Coremetrics suite also includes a live mail product that allows the insurer to automatically intervene when customers drop out to ask them why they quit the site.