Safeco CEO: ‘We will sell to consumers in the way they want to buy’

Explaining Seattle-based Safe-co’s recent announcement that it would sell its products directly to the consumer over the Internet, president and CEO Paul Rosput Reynolds said the company previously had been not “completely honest” about its sales distribution channels.

“I felt very uncomfortable with the statement that we sell 100 percent through the independent agent,” Reynolds said during a leadership panel at the Indepen-dent Insurance Agents of Texas’ conference in June. “In fact, we had been selling over the Internet for some period of time. We sell through Internet agents, we sell some directly on our own platform, [and] we have a thing called ‘moving with Safeco,’ in which if a customer wants to move we can move that account.”

Reynolds said agents’ concern over Safeco’s announcement had “a little bit of a tempest in a teapot quality to it.”

She said when she began as CEO she found that “one of the issues … raised by employee after employee is that we say we sold 100 percent through independent agents.” The challenge was to figure out a way to engage in business in the digital age and “we came up with a statement … which is, ‘in the future we will sell to consumers in the way they want to buy the product.’

“I think it’s important to say what does that not mean. That does not mean we’re going to differential pricing,” Reynolds said.

Affirming that Safeco’s actions are not an effort to “undermine our independent agent network,” she pointed out that on the company’s Internet home page and in several places within the online scripting of the sales mechanism, the consumer is asked if they would like a referral to an agent. Reynolds also said Safeco has no plans to open a national call center or embark on a national advertising campaign regarding direct sales.

“There’s no effort here to become Geico or to become Progressive. … It is a statement that says, ‘we do sell some policies on the Internet,'” Reynolds said.

She expressed the belief that the direct sales method will attract young buyers who would eventually need an agent, for which Safeco will continue to provide referrals.