Why Self-Serve Client Portals Are Soon to be a Must-Have for Every Insurance Agency

When you have to call your phone carrier or bank, how do you feel? You don’t have to answer because we already know. In fact, most people do. 

Out of five hundred people surveyed by TalkTo, 58% reported feeling frustrated about being put on hold when calling a business or institution and 48% said that they felt it was unproductive due to unhelpful customer service agents. In fact, more than 80% of people are put on hold every time they call a business.

Your life insurance or general insurance agency may be different. You may be confident in your agents’ abilities to be attentive and provide great customer service. But the real question is, do your customers dread the idea of calling in general, and does this feeling prevent people from purchasing insurance from you in the first place

Policy Advisor Brokerage found that “64% of Canadians value life insurance the most”. However, 40% of Canadians do not have life insurance. Why? Deloitte reports “[a pervasive perception of] transaction complexity” as a major factor.

Is the intimidating thought of calling in to access policies and information preventing your leads from turning into customers?

In today’s digital world of instant gratification, a self-serve portal makes insurance easy and approachable for your leads.

The internet has put access to an infinite amount of information at our fingertips and it just keeps getting faster. Education and entertainment can now be found in increasingly shorter forms on social media channels, and we have the option of skipping ads by just scrolling past.

In a world where you can get what you want instantly, the thought of NOT getting what you want instantly is enough to deter some from starting at all.

To your insurance agency, this means that unless you have a way for clients to access their policy information at any given moment, on their phones or other digital devices, you are providing a psychological barrier to entry.

As the digital world progresses and information comes faster and faster, this barrier to entry grows larger and more intimidating.

With a self-serve client portal, your insurance agency REMOVES this barrier to entry by providing a quicker, seamless customer experience and strengthening client relationships. Geico has demonstrated the effectiveness of this feature by attributing up to 50% of their new business in some lines to self-serve options.

In tomorrow’s world of rapid innovation, we may see a variety of specialized, unique insurance products being purchased by the average policy holder. A self-serve client portal keeps their information organized, and your agency’s time is kept productive.

In future blog posts, we’ll be exploring innovations that may influence the market to demand certain insurance products. Right now, however, let’s go over the overall potential impact of our fast-changing world on the variety of policies available.

In the old days of insurance simplicity, Bob from down the street would walk into your insurance agency, you’d process him and his information would go in a file folder. If he had any questions about his policies he’d just give you a call. How feasible would that be in the future, when your clients each hold three, five, or ten more policies than they had before?

Instead of devoting your agents’ time to pure customer service, arm them with a self-serve client portal that organizes all that information for instant access at any time. Now your brokerage can spend time on real problems and real revenue growth.