Insurance agents have their work cut out for them. The industry changes every year—sometimes drastically. New regulations are enacted, insurer merger and acquisition activity takes place, and innovative technologies continue to come to market. The list goes on.
As an insurance agent, your goal is to provide the best level of service to your clients that you can. By doing so, you’ll be able to keep existing clients happy—and, in turn, generate new business through word-of-mouth recommendations.
At the same time, you need to devote a good chunk of your week to prospecting to continuously grow your client base.
Historically, agents had to keep track of the bulk of their client-specific information by hand. With so many moving parts, remembering things such as how many kids someone has, when their birthday is, and what their specific health insurance needs are (e.g., aging into Medicare) is a tall order, to say the least.
However, in the age of technology, new digital tools have emerged in recent years to solve these problems and increase agent productivity.
One such tool is a customer relationship management (CRM) system. As more and more agencies implement CRM tools, it’s increasingly apparent that those that do not are putting themselves at a significant disadvantage.
A CRM platform is a system that keeps track of all prospect- and client-specific information—including names, contact information, family information, medical histories, locations, jobs, hobbies, payment information, preferred mediums of communication, and more.
With a strong CRM solution in place, agents don’t have to worry about physically staying on top of all client communications. Leading CRM systems ship with built-in automation capabilities. As an example, with the right CRM system, you are able to automatically send each of your clients and prospects a quick note wishing them a happy birthday.
With the old way of doing things, all of that outreach had to be taken care of manually. In the past, agents might have had to organize client information in a filing cabinet or a thick notebook. Now, thanks to CRM solutions, all of that information is readily available in one location, accessible from any connected device.
As you begin your search for a health insurance CRM, you’ll quickly find out you have plenty of options to choose from. Every agency has different needs, but leading CRMs should come with the following five features.
The right CRM system will be flexible by design, enabling you to customize it to meet your unique needs.
On one hand, this means that leading systems should offer out-of-the-box extensibility, allowing you to connect the CRM solution to the other tools you use every day. On the other hand, you should also be able to create customized reports and add custom fields to the CRM platform.
In other words, you should be able to track what you want to track and analyze what you want to analyze.
Leading CRM systems are also cloud-based—or at least cloud-friendly. As such, you can access them from any device with the peace of mind that comes with knowing all of the data is current.
Chances are that you’ll want to make sure your CRM system is optimized for mobile devices so that you can work productively even when you’re on the go.
One of the most powerful features of CRM systems is their ability to support email automation initiatives.
If you’re used to sending out email after email to all of your clients, you’ll be blown away when you witness the power of email automation firsthand. All of a sudden, a task that used to take hours is accomplished in minutes. And thanks to tracking functionality and A/B testing, you are able to continuously optimize your email marketing efforts, getting better results with each campaign.
One of the biggest reasons agencies are moving to health insurance CRM solutions is that such solutions give them the ability to track leads digitally. Leading CRM systems let insurance brokers track leads by source, status, and category, monitoring conversions along the way.
That being the case, you may want to look for a CRM solution that enables you to track where each lead is in your marketing funnel and which messages are resonating with them the most. Some of the best CRM platforms also give you the ability to buy leads directly within the system itself, saving you time and increasing productivity further.
Finally, the right CRM solution will come with a number of client management tools designed to make your job easier. You should be able to manage customer appointments, send online proposals, and automate your follow-up outreach.
To learn more about the transformative power of CRM technology and why agencies like yours need to use it in order to reach their full potential, check out our new e-book, CRM Productivity Report: Taking Your Insurance Agency to the Next Level with a CRM Solution.