Growing your insurance business starts with having great relationships with all of your clients.
But in today’s fast-paced world, it can be difficult to find the time needed to provide a personal touch to every one of your customers—particularly when you’re still using an old-fashioned approach.
With the right tools in place, insurance agents can adopt efficient workflows that enable them to reclaim time while personalizing their outreach to each client.
If you are looking to grow your business, you need to have great relationships with your clients and arm yourself with the right tools. Spreadsheets are for numbers. CRM stands for customer relationship management. It’s even built into the name!
Moving to a modern CRM system will increase your team’s effectiveness, enabling it to easily personalize its communication with each customer—enjoying better business outcomes along the way.
Why a CRM is Better Than Spreadsheets for Insurance Agents
CRM adoption rates continue to increase, and for good reason. The technology empowers salespeople and insurance agents alike to deliver more value to their customers.
How, specifically, can a CRM transform your insurance brokerage or agency? Let’s take a look.
1. Data management vs. relationship management
Spreadsheets are great for storing data. They’ve been around forever, and we’ve all used them.
Spreadsheets, however, weren’t designed specifically to handle your client relationships with considerations for your insurance business’s needs. Sure, they can do the job. But just because you can hammer in nails with a wrench doesn’t mean you should.
CRMs enable agents to easily keep track of all relevant customer data: names, contact information, family information, pre-existing health conditions, long-term goals, policy renewal dates, date of last contact, and more. In short, these software solutions enable agents to keep their fingers on the pulse of all customer relationships from one central location.
With all of this personal information you are tracking for your clients, it’s important to consider the security of that data, too. When you have software specifically designed for the insurance field, you can rest assured your data is secure and protected.
2. You remove human error from the equation
Spreadsheets are all about manual data entry, which lends itself to human error—when it comes to both inputting customer data the first time and reaching out to clients moving forward.
Recommended reading: Insurance Lead Management: An Asset or a Cost?
A CRM, on the other hand, can automatically collect all sorts of data. Agents, of course, still need to make sure the data in the CRM is accurate. To do this, merge duplicate records, clean up bad data, and implement a standardized process to onboard new customers once you’ve moved to the new system.
Once your new CRM is in place and you’re certain the data in it is accurate, human error is largely removed from the equation thanks to automation (more on that later).
3. Reporting and analytics tools enable you to refine your approach
Unless you’re an Excel wizard, it’s hard to get many kinds of reports and analytics from a spreadsheet.
CRMs make reporting and analytics easy. Today’s leading CRM systems provide robust reporting and analytics capabilities that enable your agents to get better data in less time.
With that information on hand, agents can refine their approach and, over time, get stronger results.
4. Automation makes critical processes easier
Spreadsheets won’t automatically prompt you to follow up with customers or follow through on tasks.
CRMs automatically send agents reminders about when tasks need to be done and when it’s time to reach out to specific customers or leads. Data is pulled directly from the CRM to use in automated emails and other communication methods, too, so agents don’t have to worry about misspelling a customer’s name, for example.
Nothing slips through the cracks because the tool reminds agents when they need to perform certain tasks and leverages accurate data during that outreach.
5. CRMs offer a better user experience
Since spreadsheets aren’t the right tool for managing customer relationships, they can be frustrating to deal with for this purpose.
With a CRM in place, your team will spend less time formatting spreadsheets and more time closing sales of new plans and nurturing client relationships.
What’s more, research suggests that employees want to be able to use modern technology that enables them to excel at work. CRMs are one piece of that puzzle.
6. Leading solutions can be customized to meet your specifications
Spreadsheets, of course, can be customized. What that really means, though, is that you have control over which column houses specific data points.
CRMs can actually be customized. Today’s leading CRM solutions can integrate with other systems—like quoting and enrolling tools—to keep all of your valuable client information in one place. With the right technology partner, agencies and brokerages can configure their CRMs to meet their agents’ specific needs—increasing productivity that much more.
Recommended reading: How to Choose the Right Insurance Agent CRM Software
Transform Your Agency or Brokerage with Software for Insurance Agents
Insurance agents and brokers can certainly do their jobs with spreadsheets. In fact, that’s how the industry has operated for decades.
But why use a tool built for many things when you can use a tool specifically designed for the task at hand?
Ditch the spreadsheets and move to a CRM today. You won’t regret it, and your clients will notice an obvious improvement in the level of customer service you deliver.
With more time on hand, agents can nurture more relationships—creating the ideal environment for upselling and cross-selling opportunities.
If you’re looking to increase team productivity with software for insurance agents, you may also want to look into automated lead management platforms and health insurance quoting tools, too. Both are designed to increase agent effectiveness and can be integrated into leading CRM systems.
Learn more about how technology can transform your brokerage or insurance agency here.
