Real-Time Quoting: Why It’s Essential

Back in the day, insurance agents and brokers would have to manually compile quotes from several different carriers every time a prospect reached out.

Not only did this process take a lot of time, but it also lent itself to human error. Agents and brokers would cross their fingers and hope they wrote down the right quote to relay to their prospect. Otherwise, that individual would probably look elsewhere for insurance because they made a mistake and quoted the wrong price.

Thanks to the evolution of technology, new tools enable insurance brokerages and agencies to streamline and improve the quoting and enrollment process considerably while reducing the likelihood of errors.

With insurance quote software in place, your prospects, clients, and sales team will all benefit noticeably. Here’s how.

1. Better customer service

In this connected age, consumers expect businesses to cater to their needs. Whether a client wants to buy insurance at 9 a.m. or 9 p.m., they expect a brokerage to accommodate them.

By adding insurance quote software to

its website, your business becomes available 24/7. Not only does this enable you to sell at all hours of the day, but it also means you can sell when your slower-moving competitors aren’t open for business.

Beyond that, leading quote and enrollment tools enable agents to pull all kinds of quotes from all kinds of carriers. In the past, agents might have cut corners to save some time by skipping out on a few additional carriers. With modern solutions in place, you can prevent this from happening altogether.

Taken together, a real-time quoting engine improves your customer service offerings considerably, strengthening the customer experience along the way.

2. Instant gratification

Thanks to mobile devices and ubiquitous connectivity, prospects and clients today expect instant gratification; in other words, everyone’s becoming increasingly impatient.

Good news: A real-time quoting engine can meet these expectations by enabling both agents and prospects to find information about plans, costs, and benefits whenever they want.

What’s more, leading solutions feature auto-response technology that can automatically reach out to clients and prospects with personalized messages after they complete a certain action (e.g., signing up for your newsletter). As such, the need for personalization is met as well.

3. More leads

Since a real-time quoting engine is available 24/7, your business can generate leads around the clock—even when your entire team is sleeping.

The more quality leads you generate, the more clients you can expect to land.

4. Competitive advantage

You can bet that today’s leading agencies and brokerages are already using real-time quoting tools to impress their clients and grow their operations.

However, you can also assume that there are tons of less agile agencies and brokerages that have yet to modernize their approach to insurance sales.

By investing in a real-time quoting engine, your brokerage or agency can gain a competitive advantage by differentiating itself from your competitors that are still doing things the old-fashioned way.

Just like no one uses dial-up internet anymore, no prospect is going to consult an old-school brokerage to buy insurance after they’ve seen what the modern experience looks like.

5. Increased productivity

Since insurance agents no longer have to manually pull quotes from multiple carriers, they are able to reclaim a lot of time. By extending their real-time quoting engine with other tools—such as a customer relationship management (CRM) system—they can become even more productive thanks to the automation these solutions deliver.

As a result, modern tools give your team more time to focus on other important aspects of operations. Instead of pulling quotes all day or manually writing personalized emails to each client and prospect, agents can spend time writing blogs, hosting webinars, staying on top of industry trends, and training one another, among other things.

A general business can’t operate without email in this decade. Similarly, an insurance brokerage or agency can’t really operate without modern quote and enrollment tools. In fact, it’s only a matter of time before every agency and brokerage that still stands will be relying on these technologies.

Are you ready to try out a real-time quoting engine?

Beat your competitors to the punch by adding quote and enrollment solutions to your software suite today and start delighting your prospects and clients right away.

To learn more about how your insurance brokerage or agency can benefit from a real-time quoting engine, schedule a demo today to see Quotit in action.