Tackling Low Completion Rates—A Compare.Com Conundrum (a)

Abstract

In 2016 Andrew Rose, CEO of Compare.com, an online price comparison website for car insurance shoppers, faced a troubling problem. Completion rates for the site's detailed online questionnaire were at an alarming low. Site visitors, increasingly accessing the site on mobile devices, were proving they did not have the time or incentive to answer the site's requisite questions and thus were dropping off the site before purchasing policies from the site's partner insurance carriers. As Rose and his management team struggled to lift the completion rates, they narrowed their options to three potential solutions. A task for Kyle Brodie, a summer intern, was to design and run an experiment that could yield valuable insights from an estimates display, including which customer groups, if any, responded best to the estimates, and where the estimates should be included in the questionnaire. In the A case of the series, readers are faced with selecting the best solution for lifting Compare.com's completion rate. In the B case, readers must design an experiment to test the selected option, and decide on the location and content of an estimate display test. In the C case, readers are presented with the design implemented by Brodie and a summary of the results of that experiment. They must then figure out the implications of those results for Compare.com.This case was originally written for an MBA marketing class examining Marketing Analytics. It would also be suitable for similar classes in undergraduate, Executive MBA, and Executive Education programs.

Excerpt

UVA-M-0947

Rev. May 17, 2018

Tackling Low Completion Rates—A Compare.com Conundrum (A)

Car insurance is an interesting space. It's the one product I'm aware of where both the buyer and seller hope it's never used. Trying to change consumer behavior around it is doubly interesting and doubly tough.

—Andrew Rose, CEO, Compare.com

In March 2016, Andrew Rose, CEO of Compare.com (Compare), was looking for a simple solution to a relatively troublesome problem. Compare, headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, was an aggregator of insurance—primarily automotive—that allowed customers to acquire a list of real-time available quotes from affiliated insurance providers. The offering was totally unique in that customers were given actual monthly quotes, as opposed to estimates, after completing a questionnaire. Rose saw a huge opportunity for Compare to leverage its accurate price offering to compete with the larger companies in the auto insurance space.

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Keywords: marketing, a/b testing, purchase funnel, customer retention, agile development, data analytics, test-and-learn