https://www.freshworks.com/crm/crm-software/Robert Foster heads a team of ten insurance salespersons at SNY Inc, a Texas-based multi product insurance company. The company captures customer leads through multiple sources, such as marketing initiatives, advertisements, referrals and more, and runs through a series of steps from prospecting to negotiation to deal closure with each of the leads gathered every day. Of course, the process doesn’t end here. Each salesperson in the team is also tasked with managing claims, queries and all the necessary paperwork for each of the customers on board. All this, on spreadsheets.
Can you imagine what a day in the life of an insurance agent at SNY Inc. would be like? Allow us to venture a guess. 60% of their day would be spent in completing paperwork like sending welcome emails to new customers, mailing policy applications, and following up with clients due for renewal. 20% would go towards attending to emails and phone calls, 10% towards back-to-back meetings and phew! 10% in lunch and conversations by the coffee machine!
Now, as an insurance salesperson yourself, you would see two key challenges here; firstly, the insurance salespersons at SNY Inc spend a significant portion of their day performing repetitive and often unproductive tasks such as managing paperwork and following up with customers. Secondly, they just don’t find the time to attract new, quality customers, retain existing customers for the long haul and generate more revenue for their business.
Why is this important, you might ask. Here’s why;
#1 Insurance is still perceived as a commodity
Many customers still don’t know why they need to buy an insurance policy, and they don’t know how to differentiate between a policy offered by one company in comparison to another. In the first case, the problem is more dire. As Nick Chadwick, a senior researcher at Fuel Cycle, which advises insurance firms on managing customers, points out, “2018 will be crucial for insurers to focus on engaging millennials who will soon take over the baby boomers.” And, millennials are the least insured generation who dislike hard sell. In fact, they need to be engaged through multiple platforms like social media, emails and online communities.
#2 Customers want insurance to be a ‘high touch’ industry
According to EY’s Global Consumer Insurance Survey, 86% of the customers feel they’re not very satisfied with the communication from their insurance provider. From being introduced to the right products that suit their needs to addressing queries in-time and creating top-of-the-mind recall, customers expect easy-to-understand and regular, relevant communication from their insurance salespersons.
#3 Rising competition
Let’s admit it. Not only is the global insurance industry grappling with rapid technological advances, but is also dealing with competition from more emerging players, both standalone companies and insurance aggregators. How do you stand out in such a scenario? By delivering a positive experience for your customers right from the first welcome email to sustaining top of the mind recall with campaigns, newsletters, emails and more.
Of course, the list goes on.
But, the question here is, how can you, as an insurance salesperson, plan your every day work in a way that allows you to complete mundane tasks and still find room to focus on customer experience and loyalty?
Here’s where Insurance CRM software comes into play. A specialized CRM for insurance can reduce the time you spend on unproductive tasks by 75%, thus allowing you ample time to focus on what really matters – customers and customer experience.
Here are 6 ways an insurance CRM software can help you.
- Discover and organize your prospects and leads better
- Get a 360 degree view of all customer activity
- Evaluate how your deals are progressing
- Automate a large chunk of your tasks
- Work hand-in-hand with your support team
- Establish consistent communication with your customers
#1 Discover and organize your prospects and leads better
Your prospects can come through different sources; external partnerships your company has built, through referrals, marketing campaigns or other means.
As an insurance salesperson, your first step when you land a prospect would be to begin engaging with them. But, how much do you know about your prospects? 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? What kind of insurance policy are they seeking?
According to McKinsey’s report on Digital Disruption in Insurance, one of the top services customers seek from their insurers is relevant communication. This is only validated with EY’s Global Consumer Insurance Survey which indicates that close to 30% of the global customers closed a policy because they didn’t receive relevant communication from their insurers.
So, how do you ensure that you put the right message across to your prospects?
There are multiple ways an insurance CRM software can help you achieve this. First up, you can set up web forms to capture lead data and any additional information about your prospects on your website, or use live chat to converse with your prospects in real-time to understand their needs better.
Additionally, a feature like auto-profile enrichment can help you capture data from the prospects’ social profiles and other publicly listed information such as their company name and phone number. And, a web tracking feature on your company’s website can help you gather in-depth insights on the web pages your prospects visited and how they engaged with the platform.
Once you’ve established communication with your leads, how do you determine which leads to go after first? Lead scoring can come to the rescue here by ranking your lead on a scale of 0-100 and as cold, warm or hot based on the prospect’s level of interaction with your business. You can even customize lead scores based on each activity a customer performs. For example, you can assign a higher score if a customer views pricing plans, or downloads a brochure, and lower scores if the customer merely opens an email and doesn’t engage with the content in the email.
#2 Get a 360 degree view of all customer activity
One of the areas where insurance salespersons expend a lot of time is in shuffling between multiple tools to keep track of customer activity and history of interactions with each customer. An insurance CRM software can provide a 360 degree, chronological timeline view of every single interaction you’ve had with each of your customers through email or phone. In fact, you can also keep tab of tasks and appointments you’ve made with them, set up reminders for renewing SLAs, track the progress made in claims processing and more.
Aside from this, there are two interesting features insurance CRM can offer. One is call transfer. Your organization might have sales teams in different territories, or have different sales teams working on different products. When a customer calls, you can redirect the call to the relevant sales team, or even assign customers to the right salespersons depending on the complexity of engagement.
You can also set up a team inbox for your sales team, where all communication between sales reps and customers can be accessed. In a scenario where you haven’t found the time to respond to a customer’s email because you were out of office or busy, your team can jump in, understand the context of the query and ensure timely revert.
#3 Evaluate how your deals are progressing
At any given point of time, you will be dealing with more than a handful of customers who are at different stages of purchasing a policy. You might even have a different sales process for each product you sell to your customers. How do you keep track of all your deals? A visual sales pipeline can help you track your deals from a central location. In fact, you can also use this to generate revenue forecasts and determine which customer or which deal needs more focus.
Additionally, you can also create daily, weekly or monthly sales reports to determine how your business is growing, and identify gaps where sales needs to improve. You can also generate reports to identify how each salesperson is performing across territories, how many leads have come in, how many deals you have won/lost, potential value of deals and more.
#4 Automate a large chunk of your tasks
Let’s re-look at the chart we shared at the beginning of this post. Nearly 60% of your every day time is spent on paperwork, documentation, and emails. What if you could automate most of these tasks, and instead spend that time in focussing on your customers? Workflow automations can help you achieve just that. Whether you need to send a reminder email to a customer whose policy is up for renewal, you need to send a welcome email to a new customer or setup internal reminders to your sales teams to follow-up on tasks, you can let the insurance CRM perform the task while you focus on more important things.
#5 Work hand-in-hand with your support team
Imagine this scenario. Your customer has bought a health insurance policy from you six months ago, and you (the insurance salesperson) are planning to upsell to a better plan. Little are you aware that your customer has raised a query about the existing policy and is in touch with your customer support team. Now, wouldn’t that put you in a spot?
While this is just one scenario, often times, not only are there multiple databases of the same customer saved across support and sales teams, but both teams are also not aware of the communication history each of them has had with a customer. This could potentially lead to multiple emails or calls being exchanged from different teams with a customer and it can put them off.
So, how do you address this? You can integrate your insurance CRM software with a support software, so that your sales teams and customer support teams can work seamlessly. This can help you and your support team keep track of customer complaints and queries at all times, thus ensuring that you drive the right communication and the right time.
#6 Establish consistent communication with your customers
A study published by Rocket Referrals, an Iowa-based company which helps its clients improve customer relationships, indicated that the top reason why customers leave is not because of higher costs, but because they ‘lack regular and meaningful communication’ with their insurers.
Gone are the days when hard sell and minimal communication with customers worked. Today, customers are interacting with businesses across sectors such as retail and e-commerce, where the core focus is on delivering an exemplary customer experience. For insurance, it’s no different. Customers expect insurance to become a high-touch industry. They want to establish easy, regular and relevant communication with their insurance salespersons.
Now that you are armed with relevant data about all your customers in your insurance CRM software, you can use sales campaigns to create customized emails and newsletters to drive sustained engagement with your customers. You can wish them for their birthdays or anniversaries, share health tips for the season with customers who’ve purchased a health insurance policy from you, communicate do’s and don’ts about an oncoming natural calamity in their region, or simply cross-sell or upsell your products to them. In fact, consistent communication can not only build customer loyalty, but also help you earn more referrals.
Do all this and more with Freshsales!
We understand that time is of paramount importance to you and customers form the core of your business. Freshsales is an easy and intuitive CRM software. With Freshsales you can gather valuable insights about your leads and prospects, access all customer history in a single view, manage deals in a central location, automate a significant portion of your daily tasks, review how your sales teams are performing from time to time, and even unify your support platform by integrating with Freshdesk. Get your 30-day free trial today.
