Kundenbindung in der Versicherungswirtschaft — neo-institutionenökonomische Analyse und marketingpolitische Ansatzpunkte

In the 90s a shift from a supply-driven to a demand-driven insurance market has taken place in Germany, and insurance companies have started to create customer loyalty by orientating their marketing policies towards the creation of and maintenance of long-term relationships. However, in the case of insurance services, uncertainty and the “information” factor play an important role. Therefore this article develops the characteristics of insurance services by using the paradigm of information economics and subsequently demonstrates the importance of trust in creating and maintaining long term insurer customer collaboration. Finally the economic implications of relational effects on customers and insurers are set forth. It can be shown that customer loyalty is mainly the result of successful management of customer relation.     

Kundenbindung in der Versicherungswirtschaft: Ergebnisse einer theoretischen und empirischen Analyse

In this article customer retention is analysed both theoretically and empirically, especially the retention of customer to insurance intermediaries. After the construct of customer retention has been conceptualised, the determinants of customer retention in the insurance business are derived. The empirical analysis is based on interviews of German customers of an internationaly operating financial services company. A total of 1,003 interviews were conducted. The analysis of customer retention through the usage of structural equation modelling forms the main part of this article. A comparison of three methods — structural equation modelling, neural networks and decision trees — shows that they are complementary and a combined application of these methods brings additional insights. On the basis of the determinants of customer retention, a typology of customers is built through hierarchical cluster analysis. The management of customer retention can be realised either by manipulating the determinants of customer retention or by ad dressing the identified customer types with a segment specific marketing mix.     

Expert Systems at the Customer Interface

ESCFE (Expert System for Customer Facing Environments) is an integrated expert systems architecture which supports a three-way dialogue between British Telecommunications (BT) customers, staff and its technical and commercial support systems. ESCFE is customer facing—this means that the user interface dialogue is directed explicitly at the customer, as opposed to other expert systems/help desks which have a user interface directed at staff, who then deal with the customer in whatever manner they have been trained. In dealing with the customer, BT staff require a wide range of knowledge concerning the products and services portfolio, internal BT procedures, selling opportunities, customer-care policy and contractual liabilities. This knowledge can be contained within ESCFE. The knowledge is used to support a dialogue which allows for both customer- and staff-driven interaction, and for different levels of expertise in both customers and staff.     

The Effects of Customer Satisfaction on Company Profitability: Evidence From the Property and Casualty Insurance Industry

Prior literature presents a positive link between customer satisfaction and firms’ financial outcomes, including greater revenue, profitability, and prices. However, few studies approach the topic of customer satisfaction in the insurance industry. Using a unique data set obtained from J.D. Power, we observe customer satisfaction among U.S. auto insurers and link their customer satisfaction rating to insurer profitability metrics. Our results support the notion that greater customer satisfaction leads to reduced expenses and increased profitability. A potential explanation is that more satisfied customers are more likely to remain with an insurance company and refer others to the insurer, reducing customer acquisition expenses.     

ENERGY EFFICIENCY EVALUATION IN MANUFACTURING THROUGH AN ONTOLOGY‐REPRESENTED KNOWLEDGE BASE

Improving energy efficiency in a manufacturing company through an energy management system requires active participation of different stakeholders and involvement of different organizational entities and technical processes. Interoperability of stakeholders and entities is the key factor to achieve a successful implementation of an energy management system. Researchers have been developing approaches in applying ontologies to address interoperability issues among humans as well as machines. Ontologies have also been used for knowledge representation in different domains, such as energy management and manufacturing. In recent years, researchers have developed knowledge‐based intelligent energy management systems in buildings, especially households, which use ontologies for knowledge representation. In the manufacturing domain, ontologies have been used for knowledge management in order to provide a common formal understanding between the stakeholders, who have different background knowledge. This paper proposes an approach to apply ontology to allow knowledge‐based energy efficiency evaluation in manufacturing companies. The ontology provides a formal knowledge representation that addresses the interoperability issues due to different human stakeholders as well as machines involved in the energy management system of the company. This paper also describes the methods used to construct and to process the ontology. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Online-Aktivität als moderierender Effekt der Wirkung Convenience instrumentalisierender Attribute auf Kundengewinnung im Versicherungsneugeschäft

Digitization’s increasing influence on the Germans’ everyday lives leads to changes in their buying behavior. In the internet age, customer orientation means, inter alia, to actually understand the changes in the consumers’ expectations. This raises the question how the shift of customer activity from the analogue to the digital world changes the effect of certain exogenous, convenience exploiting attributes on a supplier’s predefined response variables (e.?g. customer acquisition). This article focuses on the insurance industry and, theoretically, deals with the question, whether doing business online can be considered as moderating effect of the relationship between convenience attributes (controllable by insurers) and customer acquisition as target figure in insurance business. Based on the example of contracting a new motor insurance policy it can be derived hypothetically that “digital customers” have different expectations in terms of speed of processing (as convenience attribute) than those signing a policy together with their agent.     

Kundenzufriedenheit als Steuerungsinstrument in einem Versicherungsunternehmen – nur Schall und Rauch oder ökonomisch sinnvoll?

Customer behavior is managed by customer satisfaction in two dimensions: Insurer can profit by a higher customer loyalty und in addition, by a sensitive price behavior of customers. The findings of moderating effects are mean considered and thus, customer satisfaction is a too strong indicator of economic success in established concepts. To mange an insurance company effective, it is a good advice to implement a model that is specific for each company. This model should respect the heterogeneous factors of influence due to customer satisfaction by multidimensional instruments. Hence, insurer may identify drivers of service and work with analysis of correlations to describe the coherence between customer satisfaction and economic success exactly. The alignment for customer satisfaction is worth for traditional insurance companies, but only, if customer satisfaction is understood as an economic valued management that is culturally based in the firm. Manager should account for this suggestion to follow a sustainable story in a saturated competitive environment.     

CRM in intermediated financial services markets

A division of a major UK insurance company manufactures insurance products for wholesale clients to retail into their banking and building society customer bases. This paper discusses the CRM challenges of leveraging insurance business from existing partnership relationships, including issues of confidentiality between client portfolios, the strategic use of data marts rather than data warehouses and the sharing of information. It describes the issues involved in implementing CRM, such as rolling out customer contact management and call centre systems. The study concludes with an appraisal of lessons learned, which include a better understanding of who the customers are and which of them are profitable, together with the characteristics that contribute to them becoming profitable or unprofitable.     

Frailty modelling of time-to-lapse of single policies for customers holding multiple car contracts

Corporate customers often hold multiple contracts and this might give dependence between the lapsing times of the single policies. We present a shared gamma frailty model in order to study the time-to-lapse of single car policies for customers holding multiple car contracts with the same insurance company, accounting for measured and time-dependent covariates. Customers with the highest frailty value tend to leave the company earlier than the others and finding these is a central aspect within a company’s customer relationship management strategy. We estimate conditional survival curves which illustrate the decreased survival probability of a customer after a lapse in a single car insurance policy. The individual survival curves are overestimated if the underlying association for cars with the same customer is ignored. Fitting misspecified Cox’s proportional hazards model also results in an underestimation of the standard error of the parameter estimates.     

理赔风险防范探析

现阶段,在公司管理中,理赔问题凸现出来,集中体现在理赔运行和管理现状难以适应公司科学发展的要求,急待进行改革创新。保险覆盖面的不断扩大、客户服务领域的拓宽对理赔线服务业务发展的能力提出了严峻的挑战,公司对保险主业盈利能力的要求和保险市场生态环境的亟待改善要求理赔线进一步提升成本管控的能力,金融企业集团化的发展趋势和资源整合力度的加强要求理赔线强化对资源的控制和整合能力,提升核心能力、把握相关关系、明确理赔线定位,在管理模式上有所创新,同时提升专业化能力,加强全流程控制与电子化支持,建立专业化理赔队伍,提升客户服务能力,与各产品线协同解决理赔风险。     

Creating Customer Value in Participating Life Insurance

The value of a life insurance contract may differ depending on whether it is looked at from the customer's point of view or that of the insurance company. We assume that the insurer is able to replicate the life insurance contract's cash flows via assets traded on the capital market and can hence apply risk‐neutral valuation techniques. The policyholder, on the other hand, will take risk preferences and diversification opportunities into account when placing a value on that same contract. Customer value is represented by policyholder willingness to pay and depends on the contract parameters, that is, the guaranteed interest rate and the annual and terminal surplus participation rate. The aim of this article is to analyze and compare these two perspectives. In particular, we identify contract parameter combinations that—while keeping the contract value fixed for the insurer—maximize customer value. In addition, we derive explicit expressions for a selection of specific cases. Our results suggest that a customer segmentation in this sense, that is, based on the different ways customers evaluate life insurance contracts and embedded investment guarantees while ensuring fair values, is worthwhile for insurance companies as doing so can result in substantial increases in policyholder willingness to pay.     

The effect of task complexity and expert system type on the acquisition of procedural knowledge: Some new evidence

Prior studies in accounting examining the effect of expert system use on procedural knowledge acquisition have reported that providing feedback in the form of rules, text explanation, or examples had no incremental effect on procedural knowledge acquisition. This finding is contrary to literature in psychology regarding the impact of feedback on knowledge acquisition. One of the reasons that the accounting literature may not show that feedback impacts knowledge acquisition relates to task complexity. Simple tasks require little processing on the part of the decision-maker and may not lead to learning effects even when feedback is provided. On the other hand, feedback coupled with complex tasks that require increased processing may help the decision-maker learn more about task completion causing knowledge acquisition to occur. This study extends previous research by examining whether task complexity and the type of feedback provided by an expert system affect the acquisition of procedural knowledge. This issue is important since procedural knowledge acquisition may differ between certain combinations of tasks and expert system types. This study manipulates both task complexity and the type of feedback provided by an expert system. The findings indicate that task complexity plays a major role in the acquisition of procedural knowledge for expert system users. Subjects in the expert system groups who evaluated the complex cases acquired a significantly greater amount of procedural knowledge than subjects who evaluated the simple cases. As predicted, there was no difference in amount of procedural knowledge acquired between subjects in the control groups regardless whether the task was simple or complex. Results also qualify findings of previous research in noting that acquisition of procedural knowledge only significantly differed between expert system users and the control group when the task was complex. These findings indicate that, of the two components, feedback and task complexity, task complexity plays the more important role in affecting procedural knowledge acquisition.     

Accounting in Babel? Constructing social accounting as a multi-logical performance

All social practices reproduce certain taken-for-granteds about what exists. Constructions of existence (ontology) go together with notions of what can be known of these things (epistemology), and how such knowledge might be produced (methodology)—along with questions of value or ethics. Increasingly, reflective practitioners—whatever their practice—are exploring the assumptions they ‘put to work’ and the conventions they reproduce. Questions are being asked about how to ‘cope’ with change in a postmodern world, and ethical issues are gaining more widespread attention. If we look at these constructions then we often find social practices: (a) give central significance to the presumption of a single real world; (b) centre a knowing subject who should strive to be separate from knowable objects, i.e. people and things that make up the world; (c) a knowing subject who can produce knowledge (about the real world) that is probably true and a matter of fact rather than value (including ethics). Social practices of this sort often produce a right–wrong debate in which one individual or group imposes their ‘facts’ (and values) on others. Further they often do so using claims to greater or better knowledge (e.g. science, facts …) as their justifications.We use the term “relational constructionism” as a summary reference to certain assumptions and arguments that define our “thought style”. They are as follows: fact and value are joined (rather than separate); the knower and the known—self and other—are co-constructed; knowledge is always a social affair—a local–historical–cultural (social) co-construction made in conversation, in other kinds of action, and in the artefacts of human activities (‘frozen’ actions so to speak), and so; multiple inter-actions simultaneously (re)produce multiple local cultures and relations, this said; relations may impose one local reality (be mono-logical) or give space to multiplicity (be multi-logical). In this view, the received view of science is but one (socially constructed) way of world making, as is social constructionism, and different ways have different—and very real—consequences.In this paper, we take our relational constructionist style of thinking to examine differing constructions of foot and mouth disease (FMD)¹ in the UK. We do so in order to highlight the dominant relationship construction. We argue that this could be metaphorised as ‘accounting in Babel’—as multiple competing monologues—many of which remained very local and subordinated by a dominant logic. However, from a relational constructionist point of view, it is also possible to argue that social accounting can be done in a more multi-logical way that gives space to dialogue and multiplicity. In the present (relational constructionist) view, accounting is no longer ‘just’ a question of knowledge and methodology but also a question of value and power. To render accounting practices more ethical they must be more multi-voiced and enable ‘power to’ rather than ‘power over’.     

Automated Induction of Rule-based Neural Networks from Databases

This paper describes our approach to the problem of automated knowledge acquisition from large databases of examples using an information-theoretic approach. Our previous research has resulted in practical algorithms (ITRULE) for the automatic induction of rules from large example databases. Utilizing these algorithms, the raw data can be transformed into a set of human readable IF THEN rules, thus giving insight into the knowledge hidden within the data. These rules can then be automatically loaded into an expert system shell. Alternatively, they can be used to build a new type of parallel inference system—a rule-based neural network. This process enables a prototype expert system to be automatically generated and up and running in a matter of minutes, compared with months using a manual knowledge-acquisition approach. The resulting expert system can then be used as a sophisticated search and analysis tool to query the original database capable of reasoning with uncertain and incomplete data.     

Best face forward

Most companies serve customers through a broad array of interfaces, from retail sales clerks to Web sites to voice-response telephone systems. But while the typical company has an impressive interface collection, it doesn't have an interface system. That is, the whole set does not add up to the sum of its parts in its ability to provide service and build customer relationships. Too many people and too many machines operating with insufficient coordination (and often at cross-purposes) mean rising complexity, costs, and customer dissatisfaction. In a world where companies compete not on what they sell but on how they sell it, turning that liability into an asset is what separates winners from losers. In this adaptation of their forthcoming book by the same title, Jeffrey Rayport and Bernard Jaworski explain how companies must reengineer their customer interface systems for optimal efficiency and effectiveness. Part of that transformation, they observe, will involve a steady encroachment by machine interfaces into areas that have long been the sacred province of humans. Managers now have opportunities unprecedented in the history of business to use machines, not just people, to credibly manage their interactions with customers. Because people and machines each have their strengths and weaknesses, company executives must identify what people do best, what machines do best, and how to deploy them separately and together. Front-office reengineering subjects every current and potential service interface to an analysis of opportunities for substitution (using machines instead of people), complementarity (using a mix of machines and people), and displacement (using networks to shift physical locations of people and machines), with the twin objectives of compressing costs and driving top-line growth through increased customer value.     

企业信用管理制度的创新探析——湖南永利化工股份有限公司企业管理新探索

信用风险和应收帐款管理问题是当前影响企业经营成败的关键因素之一,湖南永利化工股份有限公司通过设立信管理部门、建立客户信息档案、客户资信管理制度、内部授信制度、应收帐款管理制度、帐龄控制制度等,有效地改善了公司应帐款的市场结构和客户结构,提高了资金周转效率,应收帐款的风险大幅度降低,发展、改善了大客户的战略合作关系,在企业管理方面走出了一条新路。     

Modelling and predicting customer churn from an insurance company

Within a company's customer relationship management strategy, finding the customers most likely to leave is a central aspect. We present a dynamic modelling approach for predicting individual customers’ risk of leaving an insurance company. A logistic longitudinal regression model that incorporates time-dynamic explanatory variables and interactions is fitted to the data. As an intermediate step in the modelling procedure, we apply generalised additive models to identify non-linear relationships between the logit and the explanatory variables. Both out-of-sample and out-of-time prediction indicate that the model performs well in terms of identifying customers likely to leave the company each month. Our approach is general and may be applied to other industries as well.     

The impact of geographical factors on churn prediction: an application to an insurance company in Madrid's urban area

Geography has previously been noted as a decisive factor in business literature. This paper provides evidence of the significant role geography plays in customer lapse behaviour in an urban environment. This novel approach is based on the idea that the customers who cancel all policies and leave the company are not randomly distributed; rather, a mimetic performance of close individuals is noted. The physical proximity of the customer to the geographical focus (strategical centre, as insurance offices) and the interaction with nearby customer are spatial factors that increase (or decrease) the probability of churning. An empirical analysis using more than 7000 spatially georeferenced offline customers of a Spanish insurance company in the urban area of Madrid (Spain) demonstrated that the customer's proximity to offices of such insurance company under study decreases the probability of churning, whereas high lapse risk was detected in customers in the surroundings of the company's competitor branches. In addition, we identified spatial autocorrelation in churn probability, thus demonstrating that the probability of churn of a customer increases if nearby customers churn.     

Approaches to locating expertise using corporate knowledge

In many organizations people need to locate colleagues with knowledge and information to resolve a problem. Computer-based systems that assist users with finding such expertise are increasingly important to industrial organizations. In this paper we discuss the development of Expertise Finders suitable for use within the engineering design environment, as illustrated through the use of a scenario. A key feature of this work is that the Expertise Finder returns both recommended contacts and supporting documentation. The Expertise Finder bases its results on information held within the organization, e.g. on-line publications repositories, human resource records, and not on individually compiled Curriculum Vitaes or other forms of user-maintained records. The recommendations are presented to the user with due regard to the social context, and are supported by the documents used to make the recommendation. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Information partnerships--shared data, shared scale

How can one company gain access to another's resources or customers without merging ownership, management, or plotting a takeover? The answer is found in new information partnerships, enabling diverse companies to develop strategic coalitions through the sharing of data. The key to cooperation is a quantum improvement in the hardware and software supporting relational databases: new computer speeds, cheaper mass-storage devices, the proliferation of fiber-optic networks, and networking architectures. Information partnerships mean that companies can distribute the technological and financial exposure that comes with huge investments. For the customer's part, partnerships inevitably lead to greater simplification on the desktop and more common standards around which vendors have to compete. The most common types of partnership are: joint marketing partnerships, such as American Airline's award of frequent flyer miles to customers who use Citibank's credit card; intraindustry partnerships, such as the insurance value-added network service (which links insurance and casualty companies to independent agents); customer-supplier partnerships, such as Baxter Healthcare's electronic channel to hospitals for medical and other equipment; and IT vendor-driven partnerships, exemplified by ESAB (a European welding supplies and equipment company), whose expansion strategy was premised on a technology platform offered by an IT vendor. Partnerships that succeed have shared vision at the top, reciprocal skills in information technology, concrete plans for an early success, persistence in the development of usable information for all partners, coordination on business policy, and a new and imaginative business architecture.