Insurance is a highly-competitive industry. Clients can be demanding and may need several rounds of persuasion before they will sign on the dotted line. A lapse in customer relationship management (CRM) at any step along the way could lose you leads, customers, and profit. We interviewed Raution Jaiswal, CEO of InsuredMine, which is a CRM for insurance agents. Below are some examples of how a purpose-built insurance CRM can help you to overcome common obstacles faced by insurance agencies.
Obstacle 1: Losing Track of Leads
It can be hard to keep track of leads when there are so many different channels of marketing. An insurance agent may get leads from social media, search engine advertisements, phone calls, personal introductions, and more. Being able to maintain an overview of your incoming prospects is key to moving your leads down the sales pipeline. When it comes to selling insurance, you have to strike when the iron is hot. If you forget a phone call or miss an email, you could quickly lose a client to a competitor.
InsuredMine has a Pipelines feature that consolidates all your leads in one easy-to-manage location; whether they come from Facebook, email, or SMS. At any time, you can see open leads and assign deals that may interest these prospects. Pipelines are completely customizable and so are the stages within them, allowing you to adjust the sales funnel to fit your business operations. By having a clear view of open leads, you will know exactly where your prospect stands and what you need to do to close the deal.
Obstacle 2: Neglecting Engagement
So, you have sold a policy. Your job is done, right? Wrong. Continued engagement is essential to client retention. And investing in client retention is more cost-effective than pursuing new customers. Instead of ignoring your clients the entire time their policy is in effect and then trying to woo them towards the end of the contract, keep in touch with them often. Sincere and consistent customer relationship management is key to maintaining a healthy, stable, and profitable client base.
Engagement is important for potential customers as well. If you make a connection with a customer and have a meaningful interaction with them, they are more likely to purchase a policy from you than another insurance provider. The Engagement feature of InsuredMine has a helpful list of email and text templates that can help you to begin a friendly relationship with prospects. From Memorial Day emails to birthday texts and cross-selling proposals, it makes connecting and interacting a breeze.
Obstacle 3: Avoiding Automation
Although a large part of selling insurance depends on building a personal relationship, this is no reason to avoid automation. Manually managing your client relationships might be easy when you only have a handful of clients, but it will be difficult when you have hundreds. The last thing you want is to address a client by the wrong name or send them a message that you already sent a week ago. Technology can help by facilitating your outreach as well as provide consistency to your approach.
Automation is a primary feature of InsuredMine. You can use automation to generate welcome emails or follow-up texts to engage customers. You can also create drip campaign audience lists that automatically add new leads that meet the specific criteria, thus allowing you to target the right audience with the right message. Using the Tasklist feature, you can manage tasks and allocate them to team members. When these tasks are completed, they are automatically updated on the CRM, eliminating the need for time-consuming manual updates between agents.
Obstacle 4: Disregarding Data
Data is central to the understanding of how your agency is performing. A CRM dashboard will give you essential information—such as active accounts, policies, and premiums—at a glance. You can customize your dashboard so that the metrics that are most important to you appear first. For an agency owner, this could be statistics about territory penetration or policy counts per branch. For a team leader, this could be the performance of your team on the whole or how each of your team agents is performing.
The built-in Reports feature in InsuredMine can help you to visualize your data and gain valuable insight into blind spots and possible avenues of growth. You can identify the stages where your agents have trouble closing deals and use the Projected Book of Business tool to gauge the real value of your pipeline opportunities. Data can be grouped and filtered according to your needs and customized reports can be swiftly generated and shared. All these capabilities allow you to make smart decisions based on the metrics that matter.
CRM For Insurance Agents With InsuredMine
Customer relationship management is a core component of the insurance industry. Without effective CRM, conversions stay low, client satisfaction levels fall, and your agency will not be able to achieve its goals. InsuredMine is a CRM platform that is designed specifically for insurance agencies. It has all the features that an insurance business needs to connect with clients and close deals. Free demonstrations are available, so contact InsuredMine and see for yourself how their platform can help your insurance agency grow.