Kundrelationer på Internet : en utveckling av Skandias webbplats

Abstract: This study is made in cooperation with the insurance company, Skandia. Skandia is a part of Old Mutual group's Nordic division and is one of Swedens largest insurance companies with a total of 1.9 million customers. The company offers traditional life assurance, unit-linked insurance, private healthcare insurance and banking services. Insurance companies such as Skandia operate in a highly competitive environment. Due to this, Skandia wants to expand the contact with some of their customer base, particularly those that they have very little contact with today. Skandia wants to use their homepage, Skandia.se, as a communication platform with these customers. The contemporary literature emphasises the need to involve customers in design and decision making, the main purpose with this dissertation is therefore to identify and assess the customers' needs for a possible future IT communications platform. This essay reviews how the homepage should be remodelled in order to fulfill the consumers' needs. It also reviews what factors could influence customers to visit the webpage more regularly as well as make them feeling more secure with buying insurance at Skandia.se. The research question is therefore formulated as follows: How can Skandia build customer relations through the Internet? This thesis focuses on customers within the segment Skandia terms Base customers, whom Skandia has the least contact with today. Data collection focused on the subsegment called Workinglife, which are persons in the age of 25-50 years. Semistructured qualitative interviews with six customers, of different age and gender, within this subsegment were made. A breakdown of these interviews can be found in chapter five, where the results of the study are presented. This disseration used the relationship marketing field as a theoretical framework, particularly focusing on Prahalad and Ramaswamy's (2004) concept of co-opting customer competence. Applying this coopting perspective to design of consumer insurance delivery services is a novel contribution of this work. The main conclusion is that Skandia needs to simplify significantly both its homepage layout and product descriptions. Customers feel highly insecure about the nature of the insurance products and the differences between the Skandia insurance company and another subsidiary company in the group called Skandiabanken. This insecurity leads to a feeling of insecurity buying insurances or collecting information at Skandia.se. There are many questions concerning the products that customers always wants to clarify before they make a purchase. A possible solution to this problem is that the future Skandia homepage enables much more interactivity, which is something that the literature also advocates. Possible ways to do that are presented. In chapter seven there are also some suggestions on how Skandia can develop its webpage by integrating the customers in the product development process. The proposals arise partly from suggestions from the interviewed customers, partly from the literature theory. This chapter also includes suggestions for improvement based on the research. A general but very central conclusion is that if Skandia wants to build customer relations over the Internet, it must focus on achieving simplicity and interactivity.