Telematics insurers are on the search for their ideal typical customers – and it turns out that some of the most likely candidates are to be found in the ‘millennium generation’ – a telematics Tess and her male counterpart telematics Tom.
US consultancy LexisNexis has drawn up a detailed profile of these customers who, they recently suggested, should be among the target customers for whom telematics insurers should be on the lookout.
The profile is quite specific.
The ideal customer, their research suggests, could be someone born in 1990, or thereabouts. And there is a big reason for this – one of the notable features of this generation is that it is most likely to have grown up in a home, not just with tv, radio, hi-fi and other consumer electronics, but importantly, with a computer and then a mobile (cell) telephone.
This generation is thus the first never to have a known a time without the internet.
She (or, of course, he) would have been college educated and on graduation was able to start in a job which came with career prospects. This generation owns cars and, typically use them to commute to work – for about one hour a day.
She (or he) owns a smartphone which has, typically, 41 apps sitting on it – and are using these apps for a great chunk of the day (about one hour).
She expects ‘personal and timely service’ and is ‘smart with money and time’.
She was also used to using smartphone apps to exchange personal information. Interestingly, the researchers do not mention the other statistic revealed in the above smartphone-use statistics which show that:
[P]rivacy continues to be a concern with the vast majority (70% in 2011 and 73% in 2012) expressing concern over personal data collection and 55 percent wary of sharing information about their location via smartphone apps.
The researchers called this group of potential customers ‘mobile receptive’. They were already smartphone owners and interested in mobile telematics features. They were readily ‘persuadable’ because they could see how the device they were using constantly had further potential to help improve aspects of their lives.
However, the same researchers pointed out that using the information generated by the telematics Tess and Tom was no picnic.
Each individual policy takes up only 3MB space on the insurers’ systems.
But the data each policy generates each year takes a massive 768MB.
