How To Boost Productivity by Automating Your Open Enrollment Period

Save valuable time and energy during the OEP with these automation tips.

The Open Enrollment Period (OEP) and the time leading up to it are some of the busiest times of year for insurance agents. Between certifications, continuing education, OEP preparation, and the actual OEP season, it’s likely you’re completely swamped. 

This can make it difficult (and stressful) to stay organized and on top of client communication. Here’s how automation can make your OEP processes more efficient, thus saving valuable agency time and resources. Plus, get examples of how our insurance automation software can help you be more efficient than ever.

Open Enrollment Tips: How Automation Streamlines OEP 

When it comes to Open Enrollment, the more efficiencies you put into place, the smoother the season can run–and working efficiently ultimately makes your agency more profitable.

One of the most helpful tools you can have in your arsenal is an agency management system (AMS). With the right features, this industry-specific CRM software can help you and your fellow agents maintain optimal productivity during OEP.

AgencyBloc, for example, has a suite of industry-specific features that are designed to enable insurance agencies to hit the ground running upon sign-up. You can store important client records and communications, run reports, build email campaigns, and much more. All of these features help prevent data silos, save time, and support seamless agency operations. 

AgencyBloc’s automation features–which are the star of this blog–streamline repeatable, efficient processes to ensure you never miss a beat, even during the busiest times of the year. Here are some real-life examples of how AgencyBloc’s insurance automation software has helped agents, like you, tackle OEP.

Open Enrollment Challenge: Connecting With Clients

While it’s important to set up a communication-heavy lead nurturing initiative for new and incoming leads, maintaining regular and consistent communication with current clients is equally (if not, more) important. In fact, the number one reason clients leave is due to a lack of regular and meaningful communication. 

Email is a great way to maintain consistent communication with your clients. However, when done manually, this can take a lot of time and energy. 

Manual: Staying in touch via email without automation means you have to:

1. Remember to write the email message(s)
2. Create the campaign if there will be multiple sends
3. Determine and isolate recipients to segment your audience correctly–sending the wrong message to someone can cause confusion and creates a reputation for being disorganized
4. Send all campaign messages on time–while you’re already busy

Basically, managing email becomes an entirely separate job that you have to do on top of everything else you already have going on.

Automated: Using automation makes maintaining communication with clients much easier. In AgencyBloc, you can set up an Automated Workflow that automatically creates and sends a message after a certain trigger. 

Select the recipient and trigger criteria, write the message, and AgencyBloc will do the rest. You can streamline communications around birthday wishes, anniversary celebrations, policy renewals, and more.

Besides time savings, the biggest benefit is that this automation will run based on your current book of business, so there’s no need to update information in two databases.

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"I value AgencyBloc a lot. The automated drip campaigns especially are my favorite. I've been able to save 50 hours every Open Enrollment period just in client communications."
—Patrick O., Integrity Insurance

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Open Enrollment Challenge: Assigning and Ensuring Completion of Tasks

Task assignment and management are crucial during busy times of the year—like the OEP. Without an easy way to go about assigning, receiving, and completing tasks, this can quickly become more burdensome than it is beneficial.

Manual: If your current system doesn’t support task assignment capabilities, you’ll be forced to do so through other means that can create gaps and reduce efficiencies, like:

• Sending emails manually to each agent 
• Leaving a sticky note on their desk
• Creating an appointment on their email calendar
• Sending texts 
• Leaving voicemails
• Verbally telling someone about a new task
• Tracking tasks in a system separate from your CRM

Not only are all of these inefficient, but you may never truly know if the task was completed. Plus, you also open yourself up to the risk that tasks get missed. On top of that, you may get busy and forget to assign the task altogether. These instances are when opportunities start to fall between the cracks.

Automated: One of the biggest benefits of our Automated Workflow feature is that it assigns tasks immediately to you and your fellow agents to guarantee that nothing is missed. These tasks show up on their Activity Dashboard and Calendar, so they have a full list of daily assignments and responsibilities in one place.

Each task can include notes, have a priority level, and more to help you and your team accomplish it and know the key next steps to follow. To ensure task completion and track employee productivity, run a report using our Custom Reporting tool to see what is being assigned and completed by your team.

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"We have found AgencyBloc invaluable to the organization of our client data. We use reports to help us set goals and track progress, email marketing to reach out to clients on a regular basis, automated workflow to make sure we do not miss important tasks, and notes and activities to assign future tasks!"
—Tara W., Westhouse Insurance Agency, LLC

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Open Enrollment Challenge: Managing Incoming Leads and Following Up

Two big challenges for insurance agents are both noticing when new leads come in and being able to follow up quickly. When you’re busy selling to new clients, updating renewals, and already working 60+ hours a week, lead management and nurturing can easily get put on the back burner.

Manual: Without automation, new leads may fall to the wayside. Speed-to-contact is crucial to winning leads, and if you wait too long, your odds of conversion fall drastically. When lead management and nurturing are manual, you have to hope you notice the new lead in time to follow up and win the deal.

Fact: Following up with a lead in five minutes is 21 times more effective than after 30 minutes.

Automated: Use our customizable Lead Forms in combination with Automated Workflow to achieve that quick, five-minute (or less) follow-up time. These features will ensure you’re instantly notified of submissions from lead forms or lead vendors so that you and your team can follow up quickly. Here’s how it works:

1. Create a Lead Form in AgencyBloc and embed it on your website
2. A new lead fills out the form at their peak level of interest
3. A task and/or email notification is sent to the agent assigned to reach out immediately
4. The agent reaches out, catches the lead when it’s hottest, and gets a conversion!

In addition to these features, our activities, automated task assignments, and other agent management tools can help you save time on managing leads and lead distribution–an average of six hours during the Annual Election Period, to be specific.

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"Our office moved to AgencyBloc 3 years ago, and we haven’t looked back. We've connected the workflows to AgencyBloc's Lead Forms to automatically create a record and notify our team of the new lead. All in all, AgencyBloc has made our great office, even better. "
—Jen K., Universal Insurance Advisors, Inc.

This blog was originally posted on July 20, 2018, republished on September 8, 2020, and again on August 23, 2022.

Posted by Allison Babberl on Tuesday, August 23, 2022 in Lead Nurturing & Automation Software

1. insurance automation
2. open enrollment
3. productivity