Tele-Insuring: New Possibilities for Customer-Orientation

AS STRATEGIC IMPERATIVE Clearly, one of the most important strategic imperatives for companies in the financial service sector in general, and especially in the insurance industry is customer-orientation, in particular due to current structural changes in the insurance industry (see empirica 1995; Prokop 1996): + The high intensity of the (Europe-wide) competition, measures of deregulation, and coming along with these structural changes the decline of prices lead-beside the need for cost reductions and low-priced offers-to the necessity to gain new customers in order to expand the quantity of business. + The growing number of concentrations (mergers/acquisitions) in the insurance industry makes high demands on the care of old, in-force business customer relations, and on a coordinated appearance in the market. + The loosing transparency regarding the composition of products, and the ap-propriateness of prices being offered result in high demands on the explanation of products and prices to the customers. + The establishment of specialized and new, partly not from the financial service sector coming insurance companies emphasizes the necessity to demarcate clearly from competitors, and to offer services which take the individual needs of the customers even more into account. Against this background, it seems very likely to think about the potentials of new media, information and communication technologies to improve customer-orientation in the insurance industry. This is all the more true as beside the rationalization of business processes (see Eschner and Nestler 1994). the improvement of His research focuses on the interrelationship between strategy, new organizational structures and the use of new media and communication technologies, especially against the background of knowledge-based competition and in the education business. Other research interests are interorganizational systems, virtual organizations, and knowledge management. research focuses on the use of new media and communication technologies such as Internet and Intranets in companies with an actual focus on trust in Electronic Commerce. Other research interests are Petri Nets, databases, and the philosophical foundations of new media applications. customer-orientation is one of the main goals of underwriters when implementing these new technologies (see Frese and Theuvsen 1996). In addition to that, the financial service sector is one of the earliest users ('pioneers') of any new kind of information technology and therefore best suited for the use of new media and communication technologies, too (see Wieland 1993). The main characteristic of tele-insuring is self service. According to figure 1, two technology/location-driven variants of self service via …