Remember the days when you had to actually make yourself presentable and drive over to your insurance agent’s office to apply for an auto insurance policy? Even if you could get a price over the phone, a trip to the office for paperwork and a cup or two of bad coffee was obligatory. We all hankered for a better way to buy auto insurance, and sure enough improvements were just around the corner.
Our insurance agents began to use new technology like fax machines. With this modest upgrade in convenience we could brew our own pot of coffee and handle the whole insurance buying ordeal by phone in the comfort of our home or office, and we were satisfied for a while. But the calls were boring and could seem endless, and we quickly grew weary of all that phoning around to make inquiries.
We needed something better, and the ingenuity of the Internet has delivered. Now auto insurance shopping can be done at light speed. Gone forever are the tedious phone calls and laborious conversations with kindly insurance agents over deductibles, levels of coverage and ah, yes, our driving history. Never again do we have to spend an afternoon asking ten or fifteen people the same tiresome questions and enduring awkward silences while process our details are processed.
Today, modern laws have standardized minimum requirements for auto insurance, meaning policies offered by insurance companies are almost exactly the same from one insurer to the next. This makes one stop auto insurance shopping an exciting reality for consumers.
Just as if we had all the insurance sales people in one room together, we can have all our auto insurance queries answered at once. Better still, we do not even have to pose the questions. Our insurance needs have been perfectly anticipated by very cordial anonymous computers who do not feel obliged to engage in unnecessary chitchat.
If that is not enough to make auto insurance shoppers giddy, some insurers have gone the extra mile to offer us web sites displaying side-by-side comparisons of their product and their competitors’ products, even when a competitor offers a better price. We can select our policy, provide the required information and make payment in one sitting. If we feel lonely we can still phone up a real person agent to finalize details while we drink our home made coffee, but by and large this is not necessary.
We wanted truly easy auto insurance shopping, and voila, it is here on the Internet. What more could we ask for? A latte maybe?