Insurance is a competitive business. If you want to thrive, you can’t be a dinosaur in this race. You’ve got to get technology on your side and differentiate yourself with quick and intelligent service that can give a customer what he or she wants, before they know it. Information about insurance is easily accessible online which allows potential customers to compare prices and find the best deal, cutting out the middleman. How can your business overcome these hurdles? At the heart of the insurance business, like every other business, is the customer. Building a relationship with them, and then doing everything you can to maintain it, is the secret sauce to any successful business. Film producer, Jerry Weintraub said, “Relationships are the only thing that matters in business and in life.” And he was right! For all these reasons and more, it is unthinkable in this day and age for an insurance company to not use a CRM. An insurance CRM allows you to keep track of all relevant customer information and develop an excellent understanding of your client’s needs and wants. Finding new customers and winning their loyalty over a period of time is facilitated in an easy and accessible manner by the right tool. So what can an insurance CRM do for you? Let’s list out some benefits:
1.Organizes all your data in one place
Building a relationship with a customer is possible only if you know them well. An insurance CRM gives you all the information about a customer in a single view. You don’t need to change tabs, scan your spreadsheets, sift through sheaves of paper or post-it notes and pray you find what you’re looking for. Customer records, contracts, and proposals are all accessible at the click of a button in one place: your insurance CRM software. What about the lead data captured through contact forms on your website? A simple integration allows you to see that information, organized through automated workflow, again within the CRM. Even past interactions – over phone and email – are recorded in one place so that you don’t need to go anywhere else.
2.Reduces workload
You might have a billion tasks to do, but with an insurance CRM, you can check a few off your list. While you’re doing all the hard work of acquiring new leads, selling and converting, here is a tool that captures leads from your website, almost instantly. It works as effectively if you’re on the go and want to add contacts on your mobile CRM. Repetitive tasks like sending out welcome emails, follow-ups or setting reminders and tasks can all be automated easily. Segments can be created depending on where the customer lies in the sales cycle and targeted bulk emails can be scheduled from within the CRM. This offering is differentiating factor too, as this Accenture study suggests 80% of policyholders would switch insurers to get more personalized service.
Many CRMs can automatically enrich a lead’s profile, adding details like social media links, company background, and location. This simple integration can give your sales team a massive insight into the lead’s interests and help them close deals faster.
3.Tracks the progress of your deals
Stay hungry, stay organized – perhaps that should be the mantra of every salesperson ever. Conversion is always a challenge, which is why if you’re in sales you need to watch every lead passing through the sales pipeline like a hawk. An insurance CRM tracks deals across the sales pipeline on a day-to-day basis, giving your sales process the discipline and structure it needs. You can create automated tasks and sales campaigns along each step to make sure the client moves forward in the sales funnel. At a single glance you can view how many deals are you closing this month, which deals haven’t progressed, which ones to focus on and which ones to discard. Features like lead scoring can help you classify and focus on customers who are more likely to convert. Get a real-time understanding of what works and what doesn’t, which channels are performing well and where the bottlenecks lie, making your strategy and approach to problem-solving accurate and data-driven so that you’re not left guessing.
- Helps build customer loyalty with meaningful conversations
The most efficient way to retain customers or gain their loyalty for life, is to meet or exceed their expectations. The first step towards doing this is perhaps by identifying customers who are likely to churn and then addressing their issues in an efficient manner. Similarly, identifying existing customers who you can upsell or cross-sell to can ensure loyalty.
You can identify both types of customers by using features like lead scoring, which allows you score leads based on the pages in the website they visited, the emails they opened, and more. Integrating with helpdesk tools like Freshdesk can give you access to support tickets raised by customers and help understand the customer’s needs before upselling, and addresses concerns to avoid churn.
Understanding the customer well means you can genuinely add value, innovate in terms of your offerings and products and win loyalty. If you are accessible, empathetic and reliable consistently, customers will stay longer, buy more insurance products and recommend you to their friends and colleagues and turn into your company’s evangelists.
5.Collaboration with other teams
Successful companies maintain a 360-degree view of the customer. This holistic approach looks beyond teams and channels to give the customer a positive experience at every touch point.
An insurance CRM doesn’t benefit the sales team alone, it is built to facilitate marketing and support teams as well. It helps align the sales and marketing teams by creating a streamlined process and shared goals. Insights around the highest converting marketing channels can impact strategy and can help improve marketing ROI. All communication efforts can be cohesive and automated using a CRM, so that no mixed messages go out from the two teams.
The support team can also be empowered by an insurance CRM due to the access to customer data and transparent data sharing between teams, leading to faster resolutions. This can also encourage companies to widen their product catalog to create more touch-points between the organization and the consumer throughout the year.
In a survey conducted by Deloitte, the implementation of CRM by insurance companies in the US has grown from 18.1% in 2016 to 24.2% in 2018. Though the growth is slow, the benefits of insurance CRM cannot be ignored. Especially in a market where customer experience is a massive differentiator. The Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America (IIABA) found that only 7% agencies had live-chat capabilities, and just 18% provided 24×7 customer service. The good news is that there is a world of opportunities that can change the landscape of the insurance industry as we know it. If you’re ready to embrace it.
