The US insurance industry, in 2020, collected $1.28TN in net premiums; no wonder it’s so intensely competitive. Managers need to do everything possible to equip insurance agents with the most effective solutions. Working in remote environments is fast becoming a norm, and how you empower your agents to navigate through all this is key.
A Gartner study found that more than 70% of CX leaders struggle to design projects that increase customer loyalty and achieve results. Thankfully, a strong commitment to empowering your agents with the help of technology and support can bring amazing results.
Helping insurance agents win
Here are four ways you can enable your agents to excel in remote environments.
1. Create winning playbooks
Why is it that only a handful of your insurance agents are star performers? Top insurance agents are able to convert more leads and generate more business per client. Their timing for follow ups, their ability to pick up cues, their deeper understanding of products… everything adds up to give them an edge over their peers.
And yet, the learnings from these performers are so complex that legacy systems are inadequate to really make anything meaningful out of this. You want a robust, comprehensive platform that not only records all actions, but also uses ML (machine learning) to connect the dots.Such a platform will log all sales activity, wade through the data, and then come up with the optimal solution for the rest of the salespeople to emulate.
2. Improve lead allocation
If your insurance company is using some form of manual lead allocation, you’re leaving lots of money on the table. That’s because such a system is sub-optimal, subjective, and often leads to delays in the first response to the lead.
A comprehensively researched guide that Gartner put together, reveals that businesses leveraging sales-focused technology dramatically improve the outcomes of every meeting or call your sales teams make.
3. Provide contextual nudges
The true power of a platform lies in picking up small data signals and leveraging them in a way that’d bring about important transformation. An intelligent platform will act like a personal sales assistant and nudge the salesperson on the ground for various actions, like, say, reminders for meetings. Your customer-facing teams could receive alerts well ahead in time to avoid missing deadlines.
4. Make coaching efficient
Isolated data slows down decision making, increases responses time, and leads to sales funnel leakage.
A single pane of glass view, on the other hand, empowers managers. It hugely improves data visibility. As a result, managers can identify the steps that the sales team is either missing or doing incorrectly. Which is how their coaching for the sales teams becomes relevant and produces much better results.
The summing up
Creating efficient playbooks, improving lead allocation, providing contextual nudges and using powerful coaching are four key activities to power up your insurance agents. By creating stronger, technology-backed sales processes, you are setting up your agents for success.
Perhaps you’d like to read further to learn how one of India’s largest insurers improved engagement.