Closely Monitor This Information at Your Agency to Provide Better Customer Service

How to Provide Excellent Customer Service

Your clients want excellent customer service. Period.

A study showed that “by far, the most requested improvement from customers was ‘Better Human Service’.”

The insurance industry is a naturally human industry. Yes, technology is playing a much larger part in purchasing and servicing across all industries, but insurance agents should be careful to not lose sight of the customer’s experience.

Gartner reports: “When it comes to making a purchase, 64% of people find customer experience more important than price.”

Excellent customer service begins and ends with open, regular communication with your clients.

Providing Better Customer Service

So, how can you be sure your agency is communicating enough with your clients and providing the customer service they crave? It starts with monitoring the right information and communicating at the right times.

Ongoing Activities

First, does your agency have a way to track all of your client activities or “to-dos” in a way that ensures nothing is missed? For instance, if you’re keeping to-dos on post-it notes, those can easily get lost or forgotten. 

In an agency management system (AMS), you have a dashboard that you refer to every day with all of your to-dos neatly organized with due dates, others involved, related documentation, and more. This way, you keep clients’ needs top-of-mind and activities for them don’t fall through the cracks.

AgencyBloc Activity List

AgencyBloc Open Activities by Status Graph

Pending Policies

Can you quickly pull up information on all of your pending policies to see where they are at in the process? This is important for two reasons: staying on top of your to-dos (like we discussed) and being able to quickly answer client questions if they call in or email you. 

Arise reports that 80% of customers expect a response to email within 24 hours, and 96% expect it within 48 hours. And if they call you, it’s best to be able to answer their question immediately vs. saying, “let me look up your record and I’ll call you back.” Having updated, easily accessible information will help you do this.

In AgencyBloc, a health & life insurance AMS, you can save searches based on almost endless criteria. For this situation, you would enter search criteria to pull up all policies with a pending status and save that search to view on your dashboard every day.

Policy Renewals

An important aspect of providing an excellent customer experience is proactive communication: talking with your client before something arises. Obviously, any negative issue applies here—if you can see something coming that will affect your client, be sure to reach out right away. But, proactively communicating about policy renewals is important too.

AgencyBloc allows you to automate some of this using automated activities and email. You can set a reminder for yourself based on renewal date to be sure you reach out, and you can also choose to have an automated email sent to your client a specific amount of time before their renewal date.

Policy Renewal Automated Workflow in AgencyBloc

Cross-Sell Opportunities

A big part of providing an excellent customer experience is providing value. Keeping an eye on any additional products or services that would benefit your clients should always be top-of-mind.

With an agency management system (AMS), you're just a quick search or report away from identifying opportunities for your clients.

Within AgencyBloc, individual and group clients are linked to policies. Using AgencyBloc’s Policy Cross Sell Report, you can identify cross-sell opportunities instantly.

Learn more about cross-selling techniques for life & health insurance agents: How to Identify & Convert Cross-Sell Opportunities.

Do You Have the Right Tools?

Do you have the technology in place to begin monitoring this information and using it to enhance your clients’ experiences with your agency?

If not, consider an agency management system. It will not only help you provide excellent customer service, but it will also help you streamline all other parts of your business.

This blog was originally published on February 9, 2017, and has been most recently updated and republished on April 29, 2020.

Posted by Kelsey Rosauer on Wednesday, April 29, 2020 in Insurance Agency Management System

1. client retention
2. data management