How to Leverage Insurance Technology Software to Improve Your Brokerage
Do you need help trying to leverage technology for your insurance company? Does your brokerage's internal process need a digital transformation? Then, this post is for you.
As you may observe, technology continuously advances. So, it’s no surprise to see more insurance agencies searching for robust insurance software. Whether looking for a new insurance system or replacing an outdated one, agencies can optimize ineffective processes.
Insurance software is a must-have for insurance agencies to assist their day-to-day objectives while squeezing in more time in their busy schedules. Using this software provides a number of benefits.
This software delivers accurate employee hours tracking for your insurance company. In most cases, insurance agents are on the go; it is critical to track their hours accurately. In return, agencies can save time, effort, and resources when processing payroll.
With insurance software, all necessary documents are found in one software. Whether you want to store client contacts, policies, audits, or forms securely, the software stores all paperwork digitally.
The software enables you to create documents and forms with a touch of a button. It supports customization, ensuring that forms and documents match the day-to-day tasks of insurance agents. Plus, many software options provide read and sign forms combined with attached electronic signatures for legal and reporting purposes.
Meanwhile, if you have already integrated insurance products in your everyday operations, you may wonder how to leverage it to achieve a better brokerage in the insurance industry. Keep reading and learn how you can do it.
Easy Ways to Leverage Your Insurance Technology Software in the Insurance Industry
When leveraging your insurance technology, you should:
1. Know Your Niche Even More with Insurance Agency Management Software
In most cases, insurance agents aim to be all things to all people. However, integrating niche marketing can be a better strategy for your business operations. You have to focus your marketing efforts on a single business class to:
Earn Referrals. A growing reputation means more clients may be interested in your business by earning referrals as a result from better customer satisfaction.
Raise Standing. If you want to be the go-to agency for the insurance industry, providing your clients with appropriate policies that come with a decent cost is the key.
Gain a Competitive Edge. In reality, clients tend to go to an insurance agent who has expertise in the industry.
Build Deep Knowledge about the Industry’s Risks. As you gain industry experience, your ability to determine and evaluate risks improves.
When getting more familiar with your specialty, research which business types are common in your area. You can have a starting point to be part of trade associations that way. You also need to read industry magazines to stay up-to-date while concentrating your networking efforts on people in that industry.
2. Integrate Back and Front Offices
There is no wrong with treating your front and back offices as two operations in the insurance industry. However, it is not helpful when it comes to maximizing your sales potential. Once you remove barriers between these two offices, you can achieve transparency across the entire business. It also helps get a clear view of the customer lifecycle and journey. Having an integrated system allows your business to be run more effectively and efficiently as your data is more readily available requiring less communication between your departments.
Redacting or fencing sensitive data keeps the business GDPR compliant. However, compiling all historical information and transactional data in one place helps agents provide a more tailored and personalized approach. Having accurate notes from the customer journey enables agents to see barriers or blockers affecting the process.
For instance, if a broker plans to renew an insurance policy for a previous client, the existing back-office data can better understand the current coverage. It also helps them determine the gaps they can fill with relevant products or services.
Agents can use the existing data and information to know a specific group’s coverage types and look for opportunities. They can start identifying customer segments with coverage gaps or those who were exposed to particular risks according to that existing data. Then, agents can up-sell a specific coverage that matches particular situations. For instance, a person who purchased auto insurance for a family-sized car is an excellent candidate for upgrading their life insurance, too.
Through intuitive and well-organized insurance software alongside properly segmented data, agents can easily replicate that entire process. They can filter the contact list based on a specific policy or product and add additional filters like valuation, claims history, etc. Once they have the targeted list, they can start their sales or up-selling process.
3. Improving Data Quality for your Insurance Company
Data quality is assessed in several ways, whether for checking missing or incomplete fields, managing duplicate contacts, or checking for data accuracy.
Putting data at the heart of the business while letting the agents base their decision-making on real-time information helps better understand the customer behaviour - why, how, and when they interact with your agents. As a result, they can tailor offers and products in response to clients’ changing needs, pre-empt problems, and offer more personalized services.
You can start by considering how your insurance agents use the software and the data entered. In the case that they have to fill over 100 different fields before progressing to the next stage, there is a chance that the agents will not adopt that process until they know it is a sale, or the data will be wasted.
Relevant and accurate data for your insurance agents help them qualify their prospects more effectively and then move them through the sales process as quickly as possible. Once you separate prospect and lead data from the client data in the insurance software, you can rest assured of better quality in the insurance application and a more efficient sales process. You can even import or sync qualified sales lead to your insurance software accordingly.
4. Improve Prospecting for Insurance Companies
A few years ago, the insurance leads’ prospecting process consisted of a combination of cold-calling and door-to-door sales. This process results in difficult prediction of outcomes. Plus, the sales processes’ high-pressure caused the high-pressure tactics.
Today, everything has changed. Most insurance brokers nowadays are highly adept at using accessible lead generation tools to present a clear, compelling value proposition. However, they still face challenges.
If you sell more, it means you need to enter more data. Then, if you enter more data, you will have less time to sell. That is why you must use insurance software to optimize your time while compiling data and information and juggling lead generation. Resulting in a more robust data-driven lead assessment process. You can then incorporate
Insurance software promotes effective automation and data collection. Suppose you integrate your software with your site contact forms. In that case, inbound prospect data will go directly into the software and sales funnel rather than into the email’s inbox with similar contact information.
Automating data through insurance software can eliminate a large percentage of manual entry hours per week for every agent. As a result, agents will find the insurance system easier to use while reducing the time restraints necessary for keeping your software data up-to-date.
5. Improve Renewal Rates
One of the common pain points for insurance agencies is lost renewal. That is particularly critical if you plan to acquire a new client because it is five times more costly than retaining existing clients.
When clients renew their policies, they are more likely to begin shopping for a better or new deal invariably. If agents forget or neglect to contact those clients before the insurance policies lapse, they may end up moving to another insurance provider with more interesting deals. We offer automated reminders for your clients as one of the key features of our software.
On the other hand, the automated tasks and reminders provided by software insurance solutions can assist in the sales process, renewal ratios and retention. The software allows you to plan renewals into the sale calendars and cycle despite the complete first insurance policy. The automation also makes the process easier for your customers resulting in better customer satisfaction allowing you to build strong customer relationships.
This new digital business model will improve your renewal rates as well as your customer loyalty. Resulting in more time for your agents to look forward to new sales opportunities instead of reminding the customers by hand. With your agents getting more time for other tasks, they can improve on client interaction, customer experience and overall business value for your insurance business.
You can begin by mapping the client’s lifecycle, from initial contact and consideration to purchase, use, and renewal. You need to determine what it looks like, the key milestones, and the factors influencing the renewal.
You can take a look at the workflow sample below:
Day 0 - a prospect purchases a one-year insurance policy, and an automated calendar reminder will be added for the 275 days (about 90 days before the insurance policy ends).
Day 275 - sends an automated email template to the client to remind him about the upcoming renewal data alongside relevant information or link.
Day 305 - The agent gets automated tasks in his calendar, reminding them to create the “renewal call” to the client.
Day 340 - second task reminder appears in agents’ calendar for “renewal call.”
The automation of these business processes helps reduce manual data entry and the amount of paperwork insurance agents have to perform while streamlining the redundant internal processes. If you deliver targeted, proactive, and well-times communications to offer relevant information according to clients’ lifecycle, you can make your clients feel value.
Meanwhile, do not forget to determine if they prefer email and SMS to phone calls. Offering them service reminders combined with other pertinent information can make your clients happy.
Conclusion
As more innovations and developments are applied to digital technology insurance platforms, the better chance you have to enhance your brokerage operations. Ensure to choose the right software and reap all the benefits it offers. With all the key features Alstar Atoms has to offer; if you want the best insurance management software, you can go for Alstar ATOMS.