Delivery Briefs

CSC and AvantGo form strategic alliance; Ceres Group's e-commerce agency, WWAgency, has an agreement with the Zurich Kemper Life; cross-selling to small business customers is more effective when agents understand buying patterns and characteristics of specific groups of customers, according to a study by Baetis, Inc.

IT consultant and services organization CSC (El Segundo, CA) and mobile infrastructure and services provider AvantGo Inc. (Hayward, CA) have formed a strategic alliance to wirelessly extend insurance applications to agents, third parties and consumers.

Ceres Group, Inc. (Cleveland) announced that its e-commerce agency, WWAgency, has an agreement with the Zurich Kemper Life Insurance Companies (Long Grove, IL) to sell four of Zurich's term life insurance products through Ceres' QQLink Internet distribution system.

Cross-selling to small business customers is more effective when agents understand buying patterns and characteristics of specific groups of customers, according to a study by Baetis, Inc., a Boulder, CO-based marketing services and CRM software company. The study also identifies two kinds of "policy consolidation" behavior—whether customers prefer to consolidate insurance products with one agency or distribute them among several agencies. The better prospects for cross-selling are consolidators that are more likely to use independent agents than buy direct, the Baetis study reports.