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February 17, 2002 at 07:00 PM
Dalbar Finds Improvements In Many Financial Web Sites
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Allmerica Financial Corporation jumped into the top 25 life insurance/annuity Web sites for consumers in the last quarter of 2000, while Conseco and Zurich Life made significant improvements to their sites aimed at professionals, according to Dalbar Inc., a Boston research firm that ranks Web sites of financial firms.
Dalbar researchers base their ratings on their actual visits to insurers sites. Their quarterly rankings rate sites on their usefulness to their intended audience, currency of information and other factors.
Among sites designed for consumers, TIAA-CREF, New York, and Fidelity Investments, Boston, tied for first place for the second straight quarter, each earning Dalbars Excellent rating by scoring above 80 on the companys 100-point scale.
New York Life, earning the Excellent rating for the first time, improved from fourth place to third, bumping MassMutual to fifth place.
Dalbar says Allmerica, Worcester, Mass., made a striking improvement to its site, earning 12th place with a more consistent appearance and by making it easier for consumers to get in touch with its representatives.
Dalbar also credited Allmerica for giving consumers more retirement and tax planning support, including calculators designed for those purposes.
SunAmerica leaped 10 places, making it one of eight companies to tie for the 12th spot with the addition of investment return data and other product information, Dalbar says.
SunAmerica also added a historical lookup function that allows consumers to view historical subaccount performance data by date.
Looking at consumer-oriented sites in general, Dalbar noted many companies were posting up-to-date news. It found that 98% of life insurance/annuity carriers posted current news items on their consumer sites, up from 80% at the beginning of 2001.
More firms are also offering customers online access to their accounts. At the end of the year, 62% offered such access, up from 40% at the start of the year.
Common account access features include account balance summaries (offered by 62% of sites), the ability to make purchases, exchanges or withdrawals (36%), and transaction histories (30%).
Dalbar found that 44% of consumer sites have links to other helpful Web sites, up from 32% at the beginning of 2001.
