Traditionally, insurance companies had agents and brokers designated as the primary interaction channel with their customers. The Asia-Pacific agency channel has not materially changed in decades.

Insurance customers consider service quality and trusted advice from an agent to be an important part of their decision to purchase.The insurance industry has long relied on tied agents for sales, and these networks remain the most important sales channel for a considerable number of insurers. 

According to McKinsey Report, 55% of customers cannot imagine buying insurance online completely. This clearly demonstrates the requirement of human intervention in insurance sales. It is also evident from the report that 84% of insurance buyers refer to digital channels while buying insurance

Reasons for Buying Insurance Offline 

• Personalized advice and higher degree of trust on insurance agents 
• Complex products and lack of digital information which leads customers to seek advice from agents they consider ‘experts’

Insurer Relationship Management with Agents

Agents partner with multiple insurance companies. As they are proactive and work independently, Relationship Managers try to maintain a healthy relationship with them. By and large, RMs plan their agency engagements with minimal data support. This results in poor planning leading to gaps while engaging with clients who may need attention on priority.  Agents do not have access to real-time business metrics, rich data, and critical event triggers that could overhaul the engagement planning process.

Key Problems

• RMs do not get real-time visibility into key agency business metrics and cannot track performances of respective sales agents.
• RMs do not receive notifications of potential risks in time for a proactive intervention.
• RMs are unaware of key winning behaviors that have helped drive performance for top performers.

With a Sales Engagement Platform, Agency Relationship goals can be overhauled to reap immediate benefits, including:

• A 360-degree profile of all key business metrics with a single-pane view of engagement history, agency details, and next-best actions in real-time.
• Identify inactive top-tier agencies and take immediate corrective actions; based on real-time metrics such as leads and closed policies from agencies
• Study behaviors & activities of the top performing RMs overtime and use the knowledge to provide contextual suggestions to others for driving improved performance. 

Agencies and Relationship Managers have a symbiotic relationship, and the right data is essential in making sure that this relationship is a fruitful one. To do this, RMs need tech that can help them get a single-pane of glass view of all engagement history, agency details, and intelligent contextual nudges. 

The software they use also needs to help them identify risks before they happen (so they can take proactive steps to reverse them), gain real-time metrics from all their agencies, and study the behaviors of other top performing RMs. 

In the future, tech needs to support RMs, making their mission of establishing healthy agency relationships easier.