'Txt is Gr8' says insurance giant

Royal & Sun Alliance is upgrading its electronic insurance services, adding text messaging services and a revamped web site which is fully integrated with its call centre.

The insurer has invested £30,000 in its SMS messaging project, and e-business director Mark Christer claims it's already saving the company thousands.

"It costs £2.60 to send a letter but only 4.5p to send an SMS message regardless of where in the world you are sending it. Our users love it as we can contact them instantly to let them know what is going on," he said.

Online insurance quotes are also available using mobile phones but, said Christer, a potential customer still has to go through the call centre to give financial details if they want to buy the package.

Meanwhile, Royal and Sun Alliance is also revamping its web site. Insurance packages previously not available to online customers, such as travel or pet coverage, will become accessible, and the site will be totally integrated with the firm's call centre.

Christer expects to attract more new customers as well as tempt some of its existing two million customers online. "We have the capacity to cope with 2,000 concurrent users buying insurance from a variety of devices be it online or using mobile phones. If we throw in a few more boxes we'll be able to scale up even further," he said.

Christer added that creating a separate dot-com division within the insurance company would have been considerably more straightforward than an integrated web and call centre system.

"We could have gone the easy route to establishing a dot-com. It would have been easier and quicker but we wanted to make use of what we already had such as a good core stable system, a large call centre presence and staff experience," he said.

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