Businessmodel of Liberty Mutual Insurance

Customer Segments

Liberty Mutual offers a wide range of insurance products and services, catering to a diverse network of clients. The Company’s offerings are divide principally into two categories, covering personal insurance for individuals and business insurance for commercial entities.

Its personal insurance products serve the general consumer market, with specialist offerings for homeowners and residential renters, automobile owners, and boat owners. Liberty Mutual’s business insurance products provide coverage for small, medium, and large businesses across multiple sectors, including, among others, the following industries:

• Agriculture;
• Printing and publishing;
• Construction;
• Energy;
• Financial Services;
• Healthcare;
• Retail;
• Real Estate; and
• Manufacturing. Liberty Mutual operates across global markets, its principal market being its native US, however. The Company also serves clients across the rest or North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East.

Value Propositions

Liberty Mutual provides value to its clients in the following ways:

• Its reputation and industry standing, with the Company established as one of the largest and most recognised insurance providers in the world, having a reputation for providing reliable and effective services;
• Its broad portfolio of products, with the Company offering a large portfolio of products and services to a diverse client base, providing auto, home, and casualty insurance coverage across various markets;
• Its international reach, with the Company serving an extensive domestic client base in the US, as well as operating internationally, offering services to customers across the Americas, Asia Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East;
• Its diverse range of service channels, with the Company providing services through multiple channels, including a network of independent agents, brokers, and consultants, as well as its online customer portal; and
• Its industry expertise and experience, with the Company employing specialist personnel across its operations segment, cooperating with highly-trained partners, and having a team of experience industry executives. ### Channels

Liberty Mutual operates a website at www.libertymutual.com, through which it provides information on its products, services, and international operations. The Company offers a tool that enables customers to receive a quote online, as well as an online customer portal through which clients can manage their policies, pay bills and access resources.

Liberty Mutual sells products and services directly to its clients through an in-house team of sales personnel and insurance professionals. These members of staff operate out of the Company’s international network of offices, which comprises around 30 locations spread across the Americas, Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and Europe, including in the US, Hong Kong, Portugal, Vietnam, the United Arab Emirates, and Colombia.

Liberty Mutual also provides a significant portion of its services and products through a network of intermediaries, including independent agents, brokers, benefit consultants, captive agents, and bank partners.

Customer Relationships

Liberty Mutual provides a range of products and services to its clients on a self-service basis. This includes it online quote tool, as well as its customer portal, which allows clients to manage their policies, make payments, and access certain tools and resources without interacting directly with members of the Company’s sales and service personnel.

Liberty Mutual makes its sales directly through its own sales and service personnel, as well through a network of intermediaries. Through these channels the Company seeks to provide personalised care to its clients, tailoring its service offerings to suit the individual needs and circumstances of each client. The Company’s services are typically offered on a fixed-term basis, most usually 12 months.

Liberty Mutual offers ongoing support to its customers, who are able to contact dedicated support personnel over the phone or via email in order to receive personalised responses to questions and concerns. This includes individual teams for its various insurance product lines. The Company also provides a range of online resources pertaining to the claims process, as well as information on various billing and payment options.

Customers can additionally follow the Company’s activities, and interact with its personnel directly, through its social media accounts, including with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google+.

Key Activities

Liberty Mutual provides a range of insurance products and services, offering property and casualty insurance products; auto, home, and life, as well as personal liability insurance products; and claim services.

The Company aligns its operations into three business segments: Commercial Insurance, which provides a range of property-casualty, group benefits, and life insurance coverages; Global Specialty, which provides various specialty products and services to international markets, and Global Consumer Markets, which provides automobile, homeowners and other types of property and casualty insurance to a global client base.

Liberty Mutual serves a diverse client base spanning multiple business sectors – including the agriculture, building maintenance, construction, education, energy, and financial services sectors – and including customers across the Americas, Asia Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East. The Company distributes its insurance products largely through a network of sales representatives, agents, and brokers.

Key Partners

Liberty Mutual works closely with a network of companies and organisations in order to serve its customers effectively and efficiently. According to its website, the Company has around 14,000 partners across all 50 US states, including:

• Supplier and Vendor Partners, comprising suppliers of equipment, services, and tools that are utilised across the Company’s operating segments, as well as companies to which certain non-technical functions can be outsourced;
• Channel and Distribution Partners, comprising the Company’s extensive network of independent brokers, agents, benefit consultants, captive agents, and bank partners that provide services on the Company’s behalf;
• Technology Partners, comprising various software and hardware companies that support and assist in developing the Company’s information technology and software systems; and
• Strategic and Alliance Partners, comprising various market-leading companies across multiple business sectors, with which the Company collaborates on joint branding, marketing, and other projects. Liberty Mutual has launched numerous partnerships in recent years. This includes a tie-up with Canary to provide products and services to customers of the home security start-up, a similar marketing partnership with technology company Nest, and a marketing deal with home technology company Vivint.

Key Resources

Liberty Mutual’s key resources are its financial reserves, its technologies and intellectual properties, its IT and communications infrastructure, its online platform, its network of intermediaries, its partnerships, and its personnel.

Liberty Mutual owns a number of intellectual properties that are used in the provision of its various products and services.  Searches of records published by the US Patent and Trademark Office identified a number of patent applications in which the Company was named as applicant or assignee, including applications entitled ‘Maintaining a relational database and its schema in response to a stream of XML messages based on one or more arbitrary and evolving XML schemas’, ‘Carsharing peril analysis’ and ‘System and method for underwriting a prepackaged business owners insurance policy’.

Liberty Mutual additionally owns and or leases a number of physical properties across the US, principally comprising its network of corporate and administrative offices.

Cost Structure

Liberty Mutual incurs costs in relation to the development of its technologies and solutions, the settlement of insurance claims, the maintenance of its IT and communications infrastructure, the operations of its sales and service channels, the management of its partnerships, the implementation of marketing and advertising campaigns, and the retention of its personnel.

Revenue Streams

Liberty Mutual generates revenue through the provision of various insurance products and services to broad commercial and individual customer base. The majority of the Company’s revenue is derived in the form of monthly insurance premiums paid by its clients. The Company also generates a small portion of its revenue through the collection of certain service fees.

In 2015 Liberty Mutual generated annual revenue of $37.62 billion, down marginally on the $37.72 billion recorded by the Company in 2014. The Company generated the largest portion of its revenue through the sale of personal insurance products, which accounted for $17.03 billion in revenue for the year. This was followed by the Company’s commercial insurance products, which accounted for $11.19 billion.