Adventures in getting online home insurance quotes (in Australia)

I had inter­est­ing time try­ing to get home and con­tent insur­ance quotes online. Most of Australia’s major insur­ance com­pan­ies and brokers have online applic­a­tions to provide quotes online. The prob­lem is that of the six I tried, five deman­ded that I use Inter­net Explorer. Most required IE 5.0 though one wanted me to upgrade to the latest and greatest Inter­net Explorer 4.0. In most cases I just went to their online con­tact form and told then I did not want to be told what oper­at­ing sys­tem or browser to use and reques­ted a quote. Those return emails may make inter­est­ing reading.

It would not sur­prise me, that it was one web devel­op­ment com­pany that cre­ated a quote applic­a­tion for one insur­ance com­pany and then sold the applic­a­tion to other insur­ance com­pan­ies, the mes­sage stat­ing IE was required was remark­able sim­ilar and con­des­cend­ing. It would of been a rel­at­ively easy sale, com­pany X and Y are provid­ing online quotes, you need to do it or miss out.

The prob­lem is now you have the great major­ity of insur­ance com­pan­ies fight­ing for 85% of the mar­ket. The 15% of inter­net users who use an oper­at­ing sys­tem other that win­dows or a web browser other than inter­net explorer, and these are the tech savvy and with a higher income than the aver­age inter­net users are only being served by very few insur­ance com­pan­ies. The only one I found was www.australianunity.com.au

I am sure the bean coun­ters behind the sites that require IE would argue that that at the time their site would provide quotes to 95% of all cus­tom­ers. But that was then, now if my sample of insur­ance com­pan­ies is roughly right and only one in six insur­ance com­pan­ies sup­port browsers other than IE. You have 100% of the insur­ance com­pan­ies serving 85% of poten­tial cus­tom­ers and 15% (1 in 6) of the insur­ance com­pan­ies serving 15% of poten­tial cus­tom­ers (Mac, Linux, Fire­fox, Opera, etc users). Which mean com­pan­ies like australianunity.com.au are prob­ably doing twice the busi­ness online that the IE only com­pan­ies are. It is simple math­em­at­ics 85% divided by 6 is %15 share + 15% not tapped by the other com­pan­ies. Com­pare to 85% divided by 6, %15 share for the IE only companies.

There is also some­thing called the Dis­ab­il­it­ies Dis­crim­in­a­tion Act, which makes it illegal to dis­crim­in­ate against dis­abled users in Aus­tralia. Maguire vs SOCOG any­one?. An insur­ance com­pan­ies that requires a visu­ally impaired user who chose a Mac or Linux com­puter because the screen read­ing soft­ware is free is required to pur­chase a new oper­at­ing sys­tem, new screen read­ing soft­ware and to pay for some­body to install it (at least $1500) just to use the insur­ance com­pany’ web site, really needs to assess what will hap­pen if some­body makes a complaint.

Also had a few inter­est­ing exper­i­ences using vari­ous insur­ance com­pan­ies sites but that is another post.

Eth­ical blog­ging note, I chose to link to one insur­ance com­pany because they are doing the right thing as far as browser choice goes. They are not my insur­ance com­pany, yet.

browser choice, good busi­ness , bad busi­ness

This entry was posted on Friday, July 21st, 2006 at 12:06 pm and is filed under accessibilty, usability . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.