Time is one of your biggest assets as an insurance agent. Increasing the amount of time you have for clients can be the difference between selling a policy and losing a customer.
How can you find more time to focus on clients? By using technology to your advantage.
The rise of intelligent automation in insurance is helping agents increase their efficiency. In this post, you’ll learn how automation can help business growth and how it’s changing the insurance industry.
Insurance agents often wear multiple hats in their business. You might serve as a salesperson, customer care advocate, and administrator in a single day.
The time it takes to complete tasks in each role—and to transition between them—can slow you down. This limits your productivity and can hinder your sales. By making your business more efficient, you can complete more tasks in the same amount of time.
You’ve probably dealt with these common efficiency issues in your business:
Automation helps eliminate tedious, manual tasks. It lets technology take over time-consuming business processes. These complex processes are completed faster—with fewer human errors.
Here are three key places where automation in insurance can improve your efficiency:
The quoting and binding process can be one of the most inefficient areas of your business. You’re often working with external partners, like insurance carriers. Getting a quote back could take several days.
There’s also the hassle of filling out multiple applications to get quotes from different carriers. Your client’s information hasn’t changed, but you still have to re-enter it into multiple forms. The process is tedious.
Insurance automation can help alleviate these issues. You can use quoting software to decrease response times and get quotes for your clients faster. This technology often lets you gather quotes from multiple carriers as well, so no more filling out individual quote requests forms for each carrier.
When a prospect has to wait for a quote, you risk losing them to another insurance agent. By getting instant quotes through automation, you decrease the chance of the client moving to a competitor.
Pathpoint is a great example of automation in insurance quoting and binding. The tool lets you get instant E&S quotes from multiple carriers for your commercial clients. If a particular risk can’t be quoted automatically, you’ll still get a response from a friendly customer support representative.
Marketing is one of the most important aspects of running a business. Unfortunately, setting up and executing successful marketing campaigns takes a lot of time. Even if most of your business comes through referrals you still have to nurture leads in the sales funnel.
Insurance technology reduces the number of manual processes involved in marketing your business. It can streamline your prospect pipeline to identify which prospects are most likely to purchase a policy. That way, you can place more effort on closing deals.
Insurance software AgencyZoom uses an automated lead manager to nurture each lead within the funnel. Then, you can target those leads with a customized sales pitch.
Likewise, it lets you organize leads to evaluate why some prospects might not be ready to purchase insurance. You can use this information to improve your marketing strategy.
Processing invoices can potentially take hours—especially when clients are on similar payment schedules. Even simple, repetitive tasks, such as changing a client’s address, can disrupt your day.
Luckily, automation in insurance is designed to eliminate the manual effort of administrative tasks. Cutting out these mundane tasks gives you more freedom to explore new marketing strategies, discuss policy coverage with clients, and close sales with new customers. Insurance operation automation also helps reduce costly human errors.
For example, Applied is an insurance technology platform that includes a customer self-service feature. Your clients can log in to their accounts and change basic policy information or pay their bills online, which enhances the customer experience.
This software provides a win-win outcome. You’ll reduce the time it takes to complete administrative tasks. Your customers have access to their policies anytime and anywhere.
As the insurance industry adopts automation, your role as an agent will change. Although insurance is a product-based industry, it still relies heavily on customer service.
Think about the claim processing for your commercial insurance customers. Let’s say a construction company owner calls you for advice after their customer trips at a job site and decides to sue. They may be anxious and unsure of what’s going to happen to their business. You have to be reassuring and compassionate while walking them through the process.
Automation in insurance will make your role as a trusted advisor even more important. You can put more energy into having conversations with customers for the highest level of service. More automation means customers can get similar products from multiple agencies. You’ll have to set yourself apart by forming strong relationships with clients.
Remember that automation is only a tool. You have to use it correctly to get the most out of it. Be sure to avoid these common automation pitfalls:
Automation in insurance has the potential to increase efficiency throughout your agency. Identify the key areas that would improve your current business inefficiencies. Then, implement the automation tools that will boost customer satisfaction and scale your business.
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