Business Evaluation Essay -- GCSE Business Marketing Coursework

Business Evaluation The subject that I interviewed was Mike from Allstate Insurance. Mike is an agent who owns his own office and has his own employees but at the same time is also an employee himself for the Allstate Corporation. The nature of Allstate is the sales of different lines of insurance policies. Mike's office is very service oriented although they are in the sales business. He classifies his office as a retail business with the explanation that he is selling something that is not provided directly by him, rather by the company, and because what he is selling is being bought. Allstate is a company that has many people that work for it. Each of these employees is a separate agent that works as a mediator between the customer buying the product and the company selling the product. Thus, Mike's own business inside another business positions itself, as well as Mike, as an agency. Since Mike is ultimately a salesperson, what he does most frequently during the day is to interact with people and sell them a policy or assist them with one he already provides them with. Even though this is what he does most often, he finds human relations to be the most difficult thing to do. Working with people isn't the easiest thing to do and he informed me that in the insurance business the calming people down and making sure you do your best to try to satisfy the customer can sometimes become quite exhausting. What made this the most difficult for him was frequently having to this for customers who were upset with something that happened and trying to remain calm and pleasant after dealing with someone who refuses to be satisfied. He uses trend exploration to determine his forecast. Since he is the sales person of his business he does his own forecasting. Trend exploration involves extending a pattern observed in past data into the future. He simply looks at the past sales of a few months or a year to try to come up with a projection for the next few months or year. This is a simple way of forecasting because trend exploration assumes that sales will remain the same, however, this may not always be the case. Allstate is probably known best as the "good hands people". This is their main advertising campaign. It commonly uses the sales pitch, "your in good hands with Allstate." Beyond having a photo and na... ...is in itself is a good thing, it seemed as if the business was about to reach or already has reached its maturity. Even although the business seemed to be doing well, I feel that more effort needs to be placed into finding new customers and opening new policies. From talking with the owner about pricing, I learned that there are discounts that customers can receive by having more than one policy with the company. Two of these were: a multiple car discount for customers with more than one car on one policy and a percentage discount for policy owners who have both their auto and home policy with the company. Since the multiple car discount is automatic, I would suggest profiling as many customers as possible looking for customers who only had an auto policy with them. These customers should then be given a call to find out if they indeed had a home. If they do, then the agent or whoever was calling should offer them a quote on the home and car together so the client could com pare what they could pay to what they are paying. Hopefully this would show that there would be savings with the company, the client would switch coverage to them, and new business would have been created.