Insurance, SaaS, and Halloween

Happy Halloween! That’s the common greeting for Halloween, even though it has a dark side of “evil spirits” in addition to its happy, popular side of costume parties for all ages and candy for young people trick or treating. Halloween is now the second largest commercial holiday in the United States, which should make some businesses and economists happy.

Halloween has a long history dating back more than 2,000 years. According to this slide show from the Discovery Channel, the original Halloween was a Celtic holiday called Samhain (pronounced sow-in) that was celebrated on October 31 with bonfires, crop and animal sacrifices, and animal costumes to please and appease dead spirits that came back on that day.

Many people claim to have had contact with the spirit world; in this CNN article promoting his new album, “If on a Winter’s Night,” Sting said he’s “surrounded by ghosts.” The album includes a song, “Soul Cake,” about cake offerings to spirits on Halloween.

Halloween also has a tradition of vandalism. According to the Discovery Channel slide show, “trick or treat” was an appeal for candy in exchange for a safe house on Halloween. “Mischief Night,” “Gate Night,” “Devil’s Night” and “Mizzy Night” are different names for the same tradition of vandalism on October 30. The “tricks” common to Gate Night include rubbing soap bars on windows, throwing eggs at houses, adorning trees with toilet paper, running away after ringing doorbells, spray painting houses and buildings, setting fire to piles of leaves, and the like.

With its tradition of vandalism and the heightened possibility of encounters with spirits, Halloween has a dangerous side; that makes it a good time to think about insurance.

As if from a ghost helping me with this post (but it’s not ghost-written), just yesterday, on Gate Night, I found an excellent article in Insurance Journal by Susanna Morgan on the advantages of software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions for insurance: “How Software as a Service Helps Agents do More with Less.”

Morgan argues that SaaS, because it requires little upfront investment in infrastructure and licensing, and because it is quick to implement and accessible from any computer, can help with the following business drivers in insurance today:

• Customer retention and great customer service
• Revenue growth and a deeper understanding of customers
• Streamlined operations and improved business processes

The types of SaaS applications that Morgan lists to support the above business needs include applications for agency management, comparative rating, content management, and business activity monitoring.

I add these types of SaaS applications:

• Enterprise mashup dashboards such as mashmatrix can help retain customers and provide great service, because they can pull data from any web-facing source and display the data in a single dashboard. An example is a dashboard for customer service showing all customer information that agents need from all sources while servicing customers.
• Enterprise relationship management solutions such as BranchIt help grow revenue by discovering relationships within your organization that may help with a sale or a partnership. One BranchIt customer was able to discover employee relationships with more than 20 percent of a list of prospective customers.
• Price optimization solutions such as Mimiran help you to avoid leaving money on the table when pricing insurance products and services.
• Business intelligence solutions such as Birst and eiVia help improve operations, business processes, understanding of customers, and decision-making by uncovering patterns, answering questions, and predicting outcomes.
• Enterprise cloud databases such as TrackVia help you quickly design and deploy cloud-based applications to solve business problems.
• Integration products from Pervasive Software and Sesame Software provide data exchange and interoperability between legacy on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
• Single sign-on solutions such as TriCipher’s myOneLogin provide user authentication and keep vandals away by centrally managing user access to authorized applications.

With its strong reliance on probability and statistics, the insurance industry probably has a good estimate of the risk and cost of Halloween. The above SaaS applications can help the insurance industry reduce its cost of pooling risk and cost, and turn those savings into good tricks and treats of reduced premiums and optimal customer service.

What do you find scary about retaining customers, growing revenue, and improving business processes, and how do you think SaaS can help?