The insurance industry is in the midst of a mobile gold rush. Carriers across all business lines have jumped on the mobile bandwagon, rolling out mobile functionality to their policyholders and agents. Many carriers have relied on a single, basic metric to quantify mobile success: app downloads. But as insurers’ mobile strategies are maturing, so too is the demand for more sophisticated proof of mobile’s business impact. But few digital insurance teams possess more than the basics.   In our latest Mobile Insurance playbook report, we explore the numbers that can make mobile insurance business plans hum.

Earlier this year, we talked to a number of insurance mobile strategists so we could better understand why so many insurers were behind when it came to mobile measurement.  We learned that mobile initiatives have been:

  • Random. Early mobile apps were cheap to build, meaning that business process owners like marketing, sales, agency management, claims, and others rushed to get them into iTunes and Google Play without always considering what they wanted the functionality to do for the business.
  • Complicated.The business of insurance is messy. Multiline carriers want customers to buy bundles, but haphazard mobile execution often means that mobile functionality is uneven across products lines and processes. Add in an expansive ecosystem of agents, brokers, and service providers ranging from body shops to physicians, and carriers could be drowning in mobile data, but still be thirsty for the one mobile metric that could justify a critical investment.
  • Competitive. A lot of mobile initiatives are a response to a wider market trend: Digital insurance teams see competitors launching new mobile apps and websites and act on the urge to keep up.

If mobile success depends on mobile measurement, insurers need to confront their measurement strategies head on by using Forrester’s five-step approach to get mobile measurement done right. 

With mobile roll outs now becoming material projects, relentless measurement and benchmarking validates mobile business cases and ensures continued investment.

For more information on the mobile insurance measurement challenge,  download the full report here. Questions or comments? Feel free to ask them here or directly via email.