By Dan Baldwin, TA Executive Director
At the Channel Partners Conference today Telarus unveiled "CarrierQuoteShop.com", their new website for offering instant multi-carrier quotes to any agent - even agents that are not Telarus agents. The new site is powered by the patented GeoQuote software platform that Telarus built in-house to create instant multi-carrier quotes for their own agents.
To hear why Telarus is doing this, click the player below to listen to an audio interview with Telarus president Adam Edwards. Click here to download the MP3 file of the interview.
By creating a resource where any agent can get quotes, Telarus appears to be addressing two issues. First and formost, they are creating a tool that conceivably any or all agents will want access to which will then motivate the carriers to invest whatever resources are neccesarry to keep the information that generated the quotes current.
The second issue Telarus seems to be addressing is to prove to the telecom industry that their patented multi-carrier quote software is indeed the best solution on the market. Before Carrier Quote Shop, only Telarus agents knew and understood the capabilities that GeoQuote brought to the table. Now any agents can experience it without needing to be a Telarus agent.
Why give it away to agents who aren;t Telarus agents?
They obviously want to be THE QUOTING ENGINE. The telecom carriers are not going to want to support every different quoting service with all their data. They are just going to want to do one. To date, Master Stream was making the case that THEY were the single quoting solution the carriers need to feed. With their actions today, Telarus seems to be saying, "Not so fast - before you all get into that 'row boat' check out this high-performance 'speed boat'"!
Will it work? Will Telarus position themselves as THE quoting engine? I can't say for sure but speaking as an agent I do know I've snuck onto GeoQuote myself in the past to see if the quote I was taking a customers was indeed the best quote that could be found. If they end up being perceived as "the Google" for multi-carrier quotes then they may just win.
But what are your thoughts? Please post your comments below.
To get more of a background on the whole quoting evolution, please listen to the past interview on where history of the multi-carrier quote.
Posted 3/9/2010 by:
Dan Baldwin
TA Executive Director
[email protected]
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