Phil Daigle On Staying Competitive Online

Phil Daigle, CEO of HealthcareShopper.com, has been pioneering online health insurance for nearly a decade. He recently shared the steps his California-based operation has taken to become a successful nationwide agency.

Norvax: Tell me a little about your agency.

Phil Daigle: We’re really one of the pioneers in internet health insurance. We launched our website, www.HealthCareShopper.com, in January of 1997. At that time I wasn’t aware of anybody else who was doing it. We started just in California. In 1998, I hired an IT person that developed a proprietary quote engine. It was just for four carriers in California. But as we started to get more agents in California getting hip to the internet game, launching websites, etc., I saw the handwriting on the wall. So we added quoting ability in Texas. And from Texas we continued to add the more populous states and today we quote in over 40 states. So really we had ambitions to be a national agency as far back as the year 2000.

Norvax: How much was maintaining your own quote engine costing you?

PD: Just the IT person alone was a minimum of $3,000 sometimes $5,000 a month.

Norvax: What triggered you to start searching for a new quoting solution?

PD: I actually was headed in a totally different direction. We were falling behind technologically. I saw what Norvax and eHealth were doing as far as their quoting ability and the various bells and whistles they could offer. And even though we had good search engine placement and had plenty of people visiting our website, I didn’t feel like we were competitive any longer, as far as the technology. I decided I was going to bring in a software developer who’s a friend of mine as a partner. We were going to do a serious upgrade of our own website and sell the service to other agents. He came in and looked at what I was doing. He asked me about who was already providing these services and he said, “You know what? Not a good idea. Just buy it from somebody else.” It was like a light bulb had turned on. I’m in the insurance business, not the quoting business.

Norvax: How did the features of your new tools differ from your proprietary quote engine? Did anything surprise you?

PD: We were trying to track leads, but really didn’t have a way to get back to everybody who requested a quote on our website. It wasn’t until they requested an application that we gathered information so we could follow up with them. And that really became an outdated concept. So once the business became very competitive, we had to be more aggressive about following up on our leads. BrokerOffice provided all of that. It was right there. You see who your lead is instantly. You can choose to call them immediately if you want.

The other feature we use a lot are the autoresponders. We have a series of 10 autoresponders that go out over the first 90 days after we receive a lead. The imbedded quote link in every autoresponder we send out is phenomenal. Often the first time people visit a website to get a quote, they’re maybe looking at 3 or 4 websites, they’re totally confused. Maybe by the third time they get an email from us, they decide, “I should take another look at this.” They click on that link and they’ve got their quote right in front of them, without having to enter in any more information. I think that’s fabulous and I think that gives us a lot of business.

Norvax: How has switching quote engines affected your day-to-day tasks?

PD: I was spending 80% of my time looking after the website and keeping up the quote engine, and now I spend virtually no time with that. So I get to be a CEO. I get to plot the direction of the company, make sure we’ve got good people who are well-trained.

Norvax: And you’re probably saving a lot in IT now.

PD: Instantly I let my IT person go, so that’s $3,000 to $5,000 a month. I spend about a small percentage of that with Norvax. And that includes the ability to quote nationwide, and BrokerOffice, autoresponders. Plus it’s your worry, not my worry, to be compliant and have rates up to date and all of that. I sleep better at night.

Norvax: What advice would you give to other CEOs considering building their own proprietary quote engine?

PD: Don’t do it! I told you I was bringing this friend of mine, this software guru in. He says it’s a well known axiom in the software business that if you can buy it, don’t build it.

Norvax: You’ve had a long history of offering a quote engine on your website. Can you explain how it adds value?

PD: It makes the website interactive. If you don’t have a quote engine, it’s just an online brochure. People can’t really use the information that’s there. It’s not accessible. Of course they can download and print stuff, but who does that today? When you’ve got any number of competitors that they can go to and get a quote, why are they going to print out rate sheets from your website?

Norvax: Do you do all your marketing online, or do you also do some offline marketing?

PD: It’s totally online. We’re almost paperless now. Most carriers have good online applications we can use. We don’t do any mailing out of stuff. If people for some reason want to look at a brochure or have an application in their hand, it’s all done by PDF and email. We don’t do any mailing except policies. That’s the only thing we have to mail. We don’t do direct mail marketing, we don’t do any advertising. It’s totally about offering a really good web-based solution to health care shoppers.