The Health Insurance Agency's Checklist to Prepare for 2025

What Health Insurance Agencies Can Do to Make 2025 Their Most Profitable Year

As the health insurance industry continues to evolve, insurance agencies must, too. Changing regulations, market demands, mass plan changes and disruption, and technological advancements are just a few things you have to navigate daily. To help your health, group benefits, and senior insurance agency prepare for 2025, we put together this checklist of items to ensure you’re set up for success. 

1. Embrace Digital Solutions

Things in the health insurance industry are moving fast, especially for those who sell Medicare and senior insurance products. It’s imperative to have technology that supports your processes and creates efficiencies for you and your team. 

Using spreadsheets, paper files, or even generic and homegrown CRM solutions can make this task much harder. Why? Because they require significant customization and a considerable amount of time to make them work for your team. Additionally, these solutions don’t stay up-to-date with industry trends and regulations, which means you have to keep those tasks in mind constantly. This severely limits your agency’s ability to create efficiencies and costs more in resources and time.

An industry-specific agency management system (AMS) can make a significant difference.

An AMS can help your agency get your business in order so you can spend more time doing what you do best and less time managing the day-to-day, repetitive tasks. Some key items to consider in your AMS include:

• Policy management tools
• Insurance-specific workflow automation
• Compliance documents and tracking capabilities
• Activity/task management functionality
• Policy renewal tracking and management

Use our vendor vetting tool to guide your team during your AMS purchasing process.

2. Utilize Integrations

While looking for the right system to manage your agency’s business, another important task is ensuring all your technology solutions talk to each other. Otherwise, you could create inefficient data silos. Keep in mind the Catalyit’s 2023 State of Tech in Independent Insurance Agencies Report: 

Agencies with less than $500,000 in revenue had an average of six pieces of tech in their stack, while agencies with over $5 million in revenue had an average of 11.7 pieces of tech in their stack. 

No one solution will do all of the things your agency needs. Instead, utilize technology built for your industry that comes equipped with the integrations you need for streamlined processes. The top two integrations to consider are:

1. Lead Vendors
2. Quoting & Enrollment Tools

The more your solutions talk, the easier your work becomes and the more profitable your agency can be.

3. Leverage a Website

It’s more important than ever to have a digital presence your clients and prospects can find easily. Every day, thousands of consumers search online for answers to their questions and needs — including insurance coverage. 

To put it into perspective, Google processes over 8.5 billion searches every day. That equates to 6.3 million searches per minute.

Creating a website doesn’t have to be complicated. Use a website builder or see if your vendors offer a website option as an add-on. Ensure it connects to your existing tech stack, like a lead form from your AMS, to create even more efficiencies. 

4. Build a Client Retention Plan

To take your business to the next level, it’s important to create a retention strategy for your book of business. It’s well known that retention is a profitable and efficient way to conduct business, yet research found that 44% of companies still don’t calculate their customer retention rate. Retention is even more important in the insurance industry with the number of regulation changes and issues with agent of record changes. 

The other essential retention tool is communication.

Your clients want to hear from you. They want to know they are more than just a number or line item in your business. Putting a strategy around what you communicate and how often can make a significant difference in the relationship you build with your clients. Follow these three principles:

• Communicate often
• Communicate with intention
• Communicate with personalization 

Looking to improve your client retention communication strategy? Use these templates and workflow recipes to give your team a headstart.

5. Create a Lead Nurturing Process

Similar to client retention, your prospects also want to feel seen. Remember, if you don’t court your leads, another agent/agency will be happy to do so. It takes, at minimum, five touches before a lead becomes a client — and often, it’s a lot more. It’s essential to implement a strategy to help your agents connect with your leads.

Communication is the key pillar here, too. Use a variety of methods to connect with leads where they are. These communication methods include:

• Phone calls
• Text messages
• Emails 

Start nurturing your health, group benefits, and senior insurance prospects today with these templates and workflow recipes.

6. Ask for Reviews & Referrals 

Social proof is everything. People want to know the companies they use, and they’ll do their research to figure out who you are (another reason why a website is important!). In fact, 87% of consumers use Google to evaluate local businesses and 76% of consumers always or regularly read reviews for local businesses. Gathering reviews from your clients can help you tell that story. Likewise, referrals are essential for growth in your book of business. 

Asking your existing clients for reviews and referrals can feel daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. Instead of worrying about remembering to reach out or having those conversations on the phone, use workflow automation. Automation is a simple way to build that connection without the stress. Set it up once, and it’ll run independently to gather reviews and referrals for your agency.

7. Centralize Compliance Management

We all know that compliance is a headache, and it regularly changes. To take the stress out of compliance management, utilize tools with that process built in. 

Again, this goes back to the technology your agency uses. Industry-specific technology, like an AMS, stays current with regulations, which helps your team work more efficiently. With built-in compliance tools, an AMS can help your team streamline:

• ACA Attestations
• ACA Consent to Contact
• Broker Compensation Disclosures
• Scope of Appointments (SOA)
• Call Recording Requirements

8. Streamline Internal Activity/To-Dos

Life can get crazy when business is busy. It’s easy for things to fall between the cracks and go overlooked. Using a task manager can help. Be sure to look for a task manager within your AMS or one that can integrate with your chosen technology. It is beneficial to have one built into your AMS because it can easily connect to your records, notes, etc. 

In general, a task manager can help create efficiencies for:

• Personal task management
• Team task management
• Assigning tasks to others

Additionally, it’s beneficial to leverage workflow automation to automate some task assignments and scheduling tools to make scheduling meetings with your agents easier than ever. 

9. Prepare for Change

If we know anything about the insurance industry, it’s that change is right around the corner. We have experienced quite a bit of change over the recent years, and more is likely on the horizon. So prepare your business, be receptive to change, and be ready to pivot as necessary. 

Having the right technology in your corner can help you navigate change and ensure you’re set up for success. 

If your agency plans to adopt new technology this year, try AgencyBloc. Our Plus Suite of industry solutions is built for the individual health, group benefits, and Medicare/senior insurance space. Schedule a one-on-one personalized demo to see how our Plus Suite could help your agency have the best year yet!

Posted by Allison Babberl on Tuesday, December 10, 2024 in AMS+

1. data management
2. productivity