The insurance industry is a lucrative yet highly competitive domain. Just like in any other business, even in the insurance industry, to remain ahead in the game, it is important to remain updated about the ongoings of your customers and prospects. Unfortunately, many still resort to the tradition of maintaining a physical log book to keep track of their clients. This can be a laborious and time-consuming process that requires a digital transformation to streamline business operations and efficiently maintain customer data. This digital transformation is nothing but a custom Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) software for Insurance Industry.
What is a CRM?
Most assume a CRM is a digital registry that is only useful in creating a customer database and updating it. In fact, an efficient CRM is crucial at every stage of the customer journey right from onboarding new prospects to sustaining existing customers. It ties in with all the data sources and communication channels to help you manage your client’s relationships and interactions from a single source.
In simpler words, assume that you are an insurance agent with 100 clients insured under you. Your bonus relies heavily on the number of new people insured, renewals, and insurance claims. It is your job to call and remind a customer when they are near the end of renewal on their insurance premium. Additionally, you would have prospects who would be on the fence about either buying a new insurance plan or upgrading the benefits in any existing plan. You need to educate them by providing information but you can only do so when you can understand their requirements. Your daily activities generate a flood of data that is stored as handwritten notes or entries in devices or needs to be memorized. Without having the data at your side, prioritizing tasks would rely on complete guesswork.
An insurance CRM eliminates all guesswork as the customer data is processed and presented in a simple to understand dashboard, where the agents can track any of the client’s history easily. This increases productivity and collaboration as everyone in a company can access every detail of the interactions with a customer such as what and when was the last communication made with the customer, at what stage of conversions are they on, what was their latest purchase, any outstanding customer service requests, and many other factors.
How can CRM match with the needs of the Insurance Industry?
Insurance is a highly competitive domain as your prospects are being pursued by competition brands as well. A slight delay in approaching or communicating anything can cause the lead to be lost to competition. As mentioned earlier, the insurance industries CRM handles the burden of collecting data in one place and presenting it in an easy-to-understand format. Moreover, using the automation feature, certain repetitive tasks such as sending reminders and helpful tips are managed by the best CRM software while keeping you free to focus on acquiring new prospects. Some of the other aspects where CRM helps in daily operations in an insurance company are:
Create better customer profile from fragmented data
An insurance agent receives various documents from different clients and needs to process them at the end of the day. Collecting complete prospects data such as existing policies, the number of dependents, may not be possible for every prospect. Such fragmented data will lead to you providing generic services instead of a personalized experience (explained later). Thankfully, a CRM can build a customer profile based on every interaction that may or may not include you or your insurance agents such as:
You can have a custom insurance CRM with a feature for calculating premiums based on an individual’s risk quotient. In a nutshell, the CRM allows you to get a 360 view of your customer data which can be used to enrich future interactions.
Personalize Marketing & Sales Campaigns
Just like any other industry, the customers of the insurance industry also demand personalization. They want to suggest policies based on the unique condition and not be treated as a name in a list. In fact, 88% of insurance customers would prefer more personalization from their insurance providers (Source: Accenture). Using the data as fodder, you can use CRM to create personalized marketing and sales campaigns that allow you to dip into prospective upsell and cross opportunities for selling tailormade policies to your customers.
Better Workflow Management
When managed manually, processing policies, renewals, scheduling follow-ups, and maintaining consistent customer communication can be overwhelming for most. Any minor hiccup can cause halt operations and render the workflow inefficient. The inefficiency becomes a major hurdle when the data flow between teams is not seamless. Using the different features available in a CRM for insurance, you can create better workflow management systems that can easily allocate different leads to individual agents, generate reminders and follow-ups, and efficient communications. Instead of being stuck chasing a paperwork trail, your agents can define their goals and keep a better track of them. All documents received by the agent are easily processed, tasks like verifying forms, processing documents & claims, and creating profiles are done automatically and updated on a CRM. This keeps the agents free to focus on other tasks.
Easy team and customer onboarding
Using automation, you can create a process for onboarding new prospects with tasks such as form submissions and lead nurturing handled by the CRM. Based on customer interaction with chatbots or emails, the communication can be modified to accommodate different onboarding scenarios as well. Since the customer doesn’t need to wait in lines or wait for days till the forms are processed, the customer experience improves significantly.
In terms of team onboarding, the CRM can have tools and information to educate the new agent about the business models, strategies, and gain knowledge about the rules, regulations, and procedures followed by the institute. Since there is not an actual individual conducting the onboarding, the agents can learn as per their convenience and work simultaneously. This way, the company saves time, money, and effort behind employee onboarding
Multiple Integrations Possibilities
A CRM may not have all the tools you need for managing your operations but thankfully, 3rd party integrations are possible. This allows you to allow data exchange between the CRM and other tools such as email sending programs (ESP), platforms such as Google Apps, Quickbooks, Zapier, chatbots, etc.
Affordable and Scalable
CRM offers a plethora of tools and services to allow you to perform better and grow. However, it shouldn’t burn a hole in your pockets, so you can customize it as per your requirements. Additional features can be integrated at a later stage depending on the requirements at that time. So, a CRM allows you the freedom to make affordable adjustments and scale it according to your growth.
Wrapping Up
The points mentioned above demonstrate the importance of CRM in the insurance sector. Insurance CRM is a solution that has the potential to revolutionize the insurance sector by automating and digitizing it. Insurance businesses and agents can increase their sales closings by investing in such software. It can finally bring the common misconception of ‘Insurance claims taking years to process’ to rest as a CRM can expedite the entire process.
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