The need to build a customer-centric business

There are several challenges faced by the global insurance industry today. Firstly, even with the rise of insurance tech companies, the overall technology adoption rate of individual companies and agencies is low. Secondly, insurance is still seen as a ‘commodity’, having minimum engagement with customers. Thirdly, it’s facing increasing competition not just from other insurance players, but also from insurance policy aggregator platforms which seem to take away a major chunk of the standalone company’s customers.

In such a scenario, today, more than ever, it’s crucial for you, as an insurance salesperson, to evolve from the traditional means of selling to putting a customer at the core of your business, and engaging with them through channels that are most relevant to them. Think email, sales campaigns, social media, and communities.

But, is there room for productivity in an insurance sales agent’s day?

What does a typical work day look like for you (the insurance salesperson)? Allow us to venture a guess. It goes something like this. (Refer to the pie-chart)

Now, where in all this do you find the time to nurture new clients or sustain long-lasting relationships with your existing clients? Here’s why we think this is of importance.

According to Nick Chadwick, a senior researcher at Fuel Cycle, which advises insurance firms on managing customers, “In 2018, it will be crucial for insurers to focus on engaging millennials who will soon take over the baby boomers.” Incidentally, millennials are the least insured generation who dislike hard sell. They need to be engaged through multiple platforms like social media, emails, online communities and more. Furthermore, there’s an increasing demand from customers to have insurance transformed into a ‘high-touch industry’. It not only builds loyalty but for an industry which sells more or less similar products, it also helps businesses carve an edge over their competitors.

Take this statistic, for instance. According to a study by Bain & Company, insurers who built loyalty by embracing digital platforms and re-training their sales teams to be more engaged with their customers, gained 20 percentage points in Net Promoter Scores over a three year period, whereas those who didn’t focus on loyalty lost out by similar margins.

So, how do you find the time to build loyalty when a large chunk of your day goes in filing paperwork and performing reactive tasks?

A specialized CRM for Insurance could be just the answer you’re looking for

  • Create customized, relevant conversations
  • Effectively track customer engagements
  • Prioritize customer needs better
  • Ensure quick turnarounds and timely follow-ups

With customer engagement and customer loyalty being the main value propositions for your business today, it’s crucial to manage your daily tasks in a manner that allows you, as an insurer, to focus more on growing your business, and less on paperwork and mundane tasks.

A specialized insurance CRM software like Freshsales acts as an effective platform to automate a large share of your work, allowing you ample time to focus more on creating a positive customer experience. It organizes all your leads, maintains each customer’s history and past activity on a single platform, automates workflows, tracks opportunities, provides customized campaign features to cross-sell or upsell products, and much more.

Create customized, relevant conversations

Amidst growing competition, legal battles, rising interest rates and changing customer attitudes towards purchasing an insurance policy, there’s no better time than now to be more customized in communicating with your potential customers or leads to create a winning pitch.

How old are they? What is their nature of work? Do they have a history of severe illness? Do they own a car or a house? How many members are there in their family? Communicating with your potential customers based on an understanding of their lifestyle, interests, and needs can make a world of difference in helping you lay the foundation for a long-lasting relationship with them.

A good insurance CRM software can help you achieve this in multiple ways. While a real-time chat tool like Freshchat can be used to engage in real-time with your customers and gather insights about them, customized web forms can also be a means to collect more information about them, which can be followed up with a welcome email.

Typically, modern insurance CRM software also comes equipped with the ability to auto-enrich leads from social profiles, giving you additional information leverage before establishing that first communication with your potential customers or leads. Added to this, a feature like event tracking can enable you to plan relevant, smart conversations with your leads or prospects by letting you know which pages on your website or app increased their interest and what kind of interaction have they had on the platform.

Effectively track customer engagements

As insurance salespersons, every day you are likely to be dealing with more than a handful of customers who have signed up for different policies; life, health, automotive or more. And, not only are you tasked with addressing customer queries based on the policy they’ve signed up for, but you’re also expected to keep track of which policy is up for renewal, which customer is requesting for a claim, what progress the claims have made, what approvals and documentation is required to process the claims and so on.

Usually, in such a scenario, you are left with searching through multiple emails and conversations to see what kind of engagement has happened with each of your customers so far, which could be time-consuming.

An effective CRM for insurance software like Freshsales could reduce the amount of time you spend on unproductive tasks. An insurance CRM software provides a holistic, 360-degree view of all your customer engagements and past activities in a single panel; be it email or phone communication. You can also add notes, schedule tasks, and appointments, and attach files related to each customer, with all data presented to you in a chronological timeline view.

With Freshsales you can also ensure that your sales and support teams work together seamlessly by integrating your insurance CRM software with third-party apps like Freshdesk. This integration ensures that there aren’t multiple databases maintained of the same customer or multiple teams communicating with the same customer. It also helps you keep track of all customer complaints, prioritizing them and closing them quickly and efficiently, thus creating another layer of a positive experience for your customers.

Prioritize customer needs better

Strike while the iron is hot, goes an old adage. Today, in an industry like insurance, when you’re facing neck and neck competition, focussing on customers who are really interested in your business could help you close more deals and make you stand out in the market.

A CRM for insurance software can offer all this and more to help you carve a niche amidst other players. Lead scoring, for instance, can categorize your lead as hot, warm, or cold, depending on their level of engagement with your business, thus enabling you to focus on those leads who are more likely to close the deal.

While we’re on the subject of deals, an insurance CRM software also has a unique ability to track all your deals through a visual sales pipeline. All your deals can be managed in a central location according to your sales process. A single pane view of all your deals and deal stages not only helps you generate a revenue forecast and track the progress made with each of your customers better but also helps you determine where to focus your efforts better.

In fact, you can also generate daily, weekly, or monthly sales reports to determine the impact of your sales process, and identify strategies to improve your business. Sales reports can help you analyze deals by giving you an insight into won and lost deals, bottlenecks in ongoing deals, the potential value of deals, and more.

Ensure quick turnarounds and timely follow-ups

How can you ensure quick turnarounds and timely follow-ups with your customer without having to manually keep track of each and every task from time to time? This is where workflow automation comes into play. With insurance CRM tools such as Freshsales, you can create pre-designed emails, reminders, and follow-ups for your internal sales teams and for customers, thus allowing the system to take over, and reducing the amount of time you spend on implementing them. For example, if you need to send a reminder to a customer whose policy is up for renewal, send a welcome email to a new customer, or assign a customer in a particular geography to a specific sales team, automations can fulfill these tasks in a jiffy while also making your customers feel connected with your business at all times.

Build long-lasting Relationships

Buying insurance is not a one-time deal. From educating a prospect about the need for an insurance policy to continue engaging with your existing customers on policy updations, consistency in communication is key to build an active and loyal customer base. It could also help you earn more referrals.

Take this statistic for instance. According to an EY Global Customer Survey, 86% of the customers feel they’re not very satisfied with the communication from their insurance provider. Moreover, a Deloitte report reveals that 60% of the consumers don’t get great value from their insurance agents.

How can you turn this around? You can use sales campaigns to create customized, personalized email newsletters such as health tips for a particular season, myths surrounding car insurance or cross-selling, or upselling based on the policy a customer has opted for. The campaigns can also be tracked to improve performance and can be scheduled to be sent when the time is right.

Save Time. Build Customer Loyalty. Choose Freshsales.

With Freshsales, automate a large portion of your every task, build long-lasting relationships with your customers and stay ahead of your competition. You can secure valuable insights about your prospects and leads and plan targeted communication, keep track of all your customer engagements through email, phone, or chat, access visual sales pipelines to see how your deals are progressing, create customized sales campaigns to create top of the mind recall and more.

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Do all of this and more with Freshsales

Stay on top of your sales game

Even when you’re away from your desk, get a holistic view of all your leads, accounts, deals, and contacts on your smartphone with the Freshsales' Android or iPhone mobile app.

Access multiple integrations

Generate higher revenues by integrating the Freshsales software with other business tools such as Google Calendar, Zapier, MailChimp, or Hubspot.

Compare performance reports

View multiple reports on a single panel with the reports dashboard. Create your own or use the pre-existing templates on the Freshsales platform and share them with your team.