Is Google taking over auto insurance???
Big in the news is that you can now get auto insurance quotes from Google (CA only so far). They’ll shop a bunch of different companies and show you all the rates, then you can choose a policy and buy it. Pretty cool, eh? Many experts are kind of freaking out about how this will affect the independent agent and if it is the beginning of our demise! I absolutely beg to differ!!
Here’s (partly) why: When google asks a question “What liability limits do you want” and you see options of ‘state minimum’, ‘100/300’, or ‘500CSL’, do you know what to choose? And more importantly, WHY you should make a certain choice? An independent agent can help you answer that question. An independent agent can also help you make strategic decisions on deciding whether to decline a specific coverage. We are your partner in helping you get a policy that doesn’t over or under-insure you. Google also has tons of analytical data, such as speed limits, crash statistics, traffic stats, etc, which should help make it be able to estimate a price for insurance if they ever actually decided to sell auto insurance themselves.
But another great thing about independent agencies is that we can sell many other products along with auto insurance! Such as home, health, life, or business insurance. So, it makes sense for a person to keep all their insurance in one place, to take advantage of “multi-policy” discounts, and even just for simple ease of doing business. So, the customer doesn’t have to keep track of lots of phone numbers of places to call for insurance!! This is just the tip of the iceberg on this topic! But it’s definitely an interesting topic to see how certain groups are responding. Have a great day!
Thanks, Andy
