Why You Should Allow Insurance Clients to Pull Quotes on Their Own

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Overview: Using the right insurance software can help you empower clients to pull their own quotes and facilitate speed, trust, and client satisfaction. See how a tool like this works or keep reading to learn about benefits for your clients and you as an insurance broker.

Shopping for insurance can be stressful. Whereas some clients might need a little more guidance and would prefer to work directly with an agent, others are more comfortable shopping on their own. If you want your insurance business to reach its full potential, you need to cater to both of these client preferences. It’s that simple.

Giving your clients tools that empower them to take control of the health insurance shopping process can make them more comfortable with your business. In turn, they become convinced that you are the trusted advisor who can solve their health insurance needs because you aren’t hiding any options from them, nor are you making the process any more difficult than it needs to be.

For this reason, more and more insurance salespeople are investing in tools that enable clients to pull quotes on their own—and even enroll in vision, dental, life, and health insurance plans in a way that’s similar to a run-of-the-mill online shopping experience.

Here are a few things to consider before diving into the benefits: 

• • Your insurance software should include features for cross-carrier quoting, side-by-side plan comparisons, digital proposals, and options for online enrollment. 
  • You should have the ability to make these features available to your clients through your website. 
  • The information captured by these tools, regardless of whether you use them yourself or a client accesses the features through your website, should live in a designated client relationship management tool so you can keep track of all proposals generated and their status. 
  • You should get notifications from your quoting engine when someone is shopping on your website so you can follow up.
  • Quotit can do all of this and more.

The Benefits of Instant Online Quotes for Customers

In the digital age, the customer experience (CX) is becoming a key brand differentiator for companies across all industries, and the insurance industry is no exception. By giving your clients the ability to pull quotes on their own, you’re modernizing the health insurance buying process while improving the CX.

This delivers a number of benefits to your clients—which, in turn, makes it easier for your insurance agency to sell more products. With that in mind, here are some of the specific ways giving clients the ability to pull instant online quotes is beneficial.

1. It meets expectations around instant gratification

In the age of mobile devices, social media, and services such as Amazon and Netflix, consumers are increasingly expecting instant gratification. We expect things to be available when we want them, and we expect to be able to buy things the moment we feel like it.

By giving your clients the ability to shop for insurance at their convenience, you meet their expectations around instant gratification. 

Here are some instances when this is beneficial: 

• When a client has a new health need, such as glasses, physical therapy, a prescription drug, or a dental surgery
• When a client loses their job needs short-term health insurance
• When a client has a child who is turning 26 and will no longer be able to be claimed as a dependent on their family coverage

In these situations, clients may want to browse on their own due to the immediacy or uncertainty of their needs. By offering a website quoter to them, you can give them the peace of mind that comes with knowing their needs can be not only met but also met in a timely fashion.

2. It gives clients control over their insurance shopping experience

Some clients don’t want insurance agents to serve as gatekeepers of their medical insurance options. By giving them the ability to search for a number of health plans at their own leisure, you give them the information they need to make the best decisions—all while operating in a completely transparent manner.

Do your clients ever question the plans you propose for being too expensive? Do clients repeatedly ask you to pull additional quotes because they feel they are missing out on key benefits?

When you give them the ability to pull their own quotes, they can see what plans they qualify for, how much health plans that cover their unique needs cost, and more. No longer will any client suspect that you’re hiding options or pushing them toward more expensive plans. 

We understand you might be reluctant to give your clients the ability to buy their own plans—after all, you don’t want to take your personal touch out of the relationship or risk clients buying plans that you wouldn’t recommend.

The right solution will enable you to continue to promote your preferred products during the shopping experience. 

For example, Quotit’s Client-Driven Shopping tool enables agents to define different cross-sell packages. Imagine someone pulls up an off-exchange health plan, basic vision insurance, and accident coverage—or even worse, they only pull up a health plan—and you know the plans don’t provide enough coverage. When the consumer is checking out, Quotit’s tool can automatically recommend plans with more coverage or even additional ancillary products not in their cart. 

This way, you’ll still get to recommend the products you want your clients to see, you just don’t have to spend as much time on the back and forth. The tool will facilitate that process for you.

3. It lets customers validate their options and pull additional options

Shopping for insurance isn’t a walk in the park. In addition to choosing health coverage, many clients are also in the market for supplemental insurance products—such as vision, dental, and life insurance.

By enabling your clients to pull quotes and compare plans, you can help them validate their selections or examine additional options. For example, they might be considering adding vision insurance to their coverage. With an online quote and enroll tool in place, they can add a vision product to their cart to see how that would affect their monthly premiums. This can help them make the best decision for their unique circumstances.

4. It makes it easier to make sure they are getting the right plan for their coverage and budgetary needs

At the end of the day, every health insurance buyer is interested in picking the right plan for their coverage and budgetary needs. An online quote and enroll tool helps here by enabling clients to easily see what they’re signing up for and compare plans on an apples-to-apples basis. This gives them the peace of mind that comes with knowing they’re picking the plan that best meets their needs.

The Benefits of Instant Online Quotes for Brokers

As an insurance broker, you’re pulled in a million different directions every day. In a perfect world, you’d be able to cram more hours into each 24-hour period, but we know that can’t be done.

That being the case, you need to do everything you possibly can to build more efficiencies into your day-to-day operations. And this is exactly where giving your clients the ability to pull quotes on their own comes into play.

1. Clients can shop when you are out of the office—or even asleep

Traditionally, insurance businesses could sell to clients only during normal business hours. Although this setup worked well enough, it essentially meant you couldn’t sell insurance 16 hours a day during the workweek, and you couldn’t sell it on the weekends, either.

In the digital age, shouldn’t there be a better way forward?

Your insurance software should enable you to add client-facing quoting tools to your website so you can share access and have clients shop for themselves, even when you are technically out of the office. 

It’s an easy way to expand your hours of operation and sell more insurance, without even having to lift a finger.

2. You are seen as a trusted advisor for facilitating this option

These days, consumers are looking to buy insurance from trusted advisors—folks they can trust to help them find a plan that meets their short-term health needs, budgetary requirements, and long-term wellness goals. By giving them access to your quoting engine, you are being transparent about what their options really are, and you’re showing the work that you do to craft the ideal multi-carrier insurance package for their specific needs.

3. You can use the tool to provide more transparency in regard to their coverage options

Just because clients can pull quotes on their own doesn’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t get involved with the process. You can use your insurance software to walk your clients through their options over a screen share or in person. 

A client-facing quoting tool can help you show them that you understand their needs by sorting and filtering plans based on their personal information. It can also add more value by helping them understand their options on a deeper level.

Using Quotit to Empower Clients to Pull Quotes on Their Own

With Quotit’s client-driven shopping functionality, it’s easier than ever to empower your clients to shop for insurance on their own time. All you need to do is add our Shop and Enroll tool to your website. 

Once that’s done, you can add a link to the shopping cart tool in emails, social media posts, and blog posts to make the insurance shopping process easier than ever for your clients. It’s the easiest way to automate your insurance sales process—enabling your business to keep its doors open 24/7, so to speak, while letting your clients buy insurance around the clock, even when you’re asleep.

Quotit gives your clients unrivaled convenience, accelerated enrollment, and a stronger user experience—all while increasing engagement.

But don’t just take our word for it. Request a demo today to see it in action and learn more about how our powerful software solution can transform your health insurance business.