Insurance pain points and how to address them with automation
The insurance industry is one of the most competitive ones, making it very challenging to succeed. Most insurance brokers experience several pain points while doing their day-to-day activities, and when left unaddressed, it can negatively impact their competitive edge.
In this blog, we’ll go through the five main pain points brokers face and possible solutions to help you stay ahead of the competition.
1. Excessive manual processing
Brokers who do not use automation spend a lot of time on office administration and paperwork. Manual processing is not only time-consuming but also expensive, you either need to hire an administrative assistant or assign these tasks to your agents.
Solution:
Automation software improves process efficiency and saves you time and money, so you can focus on your customers and selling policies, instead of dealing with paperwork. Circulator provides several solutions that help brokers save time and reduce operating costs.
Credit Control
Credit control automation helps you chase missed payments and improve cash flow. You don’t have to worry about contacting customers about their missed payments, as the software will do all this for you.
The credit control automation within Circulator is a proactive solution that provides automated task management to help reduce admin costs and save time, whilst being fully compliant and completely secure.
Digital Receipts
Digital receipts are automatically issued by insurance businesses directly to the customers’ mobile or email, reducing the need for paperwork and office administration. Automating digital receipts is a more cost-effective solution that also improves the customer experience and collects meaningful data that you can use for future campaigns.
Document Chase
Every broker has the task of chasing overdue documents from clients. Automated document chase enhances business processes by sending outstanding notifications for you and helping you collect all the necessary documents to close deals.
This solution reduces insurance brokers’ cost to serve, increases productivity and improves agent efficiency
2. Poor customer experience
Being customer-centric is extremely important and is one of the top trends for 2022 and beyond. However, for some brokers, the customer journey ends with the policy purchase, and the communication post purchase lags behind.
This might be because of the amount of time needed to follow up with customers manually. Remembering and looking for when and which policies customers purchased, when they expire, how much they spend on their policies, etc., is all necessary to keep post-purchase communications relevant.
Solution:
With automation software, you can forget all about this as it will do all the work for you, with no need for any manual input. It will find the right information, for the right message and send it to the right customers at the right time.
It is probable to see an increase in customer satisfaction levels, and the chances of them continuing to do business with you will also increase.
Customer check-ins
Customer check-ins allow you to easily follow up with your customers and build better relationships while using automation. No additional effort is required. Check-in emails can be fully personalised and deliver the desired value that your customers want to receive from your insurance business.
Testimonial requests
Testimonials often play a crucial role in the customer decision-making process. At the same time, they can also help you to identify your strengths and weaknesses and help to build a better relationship with your customers.
Customers usually don’t write reviews or testimonials unless their experience was exceptionally good or bad, therefore automated emails are a great tool to motivate them to do so. Testimonial requests can also prevent you from receiving a bad review and instead initiate a conversation between you and your customers as they can see that you care about their satisfaction.
New onboarding
A fully automated onboarding process helps insurance brokers effectively communicate all critical policy information and leverage data to improve customer experience. It’s important that your customers receive all documents and learn more about your company and policies simultaneously.
3. Access to data
Data usually flows into your company from multiple sources, in a variety of forms, e.g. calls, emails, webforms, PDFs, paper forms, etc. This can make it difficult to keep data organised and accessible. Looking for information across several platforms and documents is inefficient and can easily lead to data loss. This doesn’t apply only to insurance companies but also to their customers who want to have their policy documents accessible at all times.
Even more issues may arise when processing data manually, as it might result in errors, data loss and inaccuracy in your data repositories.
Solution
Integrations and automated data collections are essential for more accessible and consolidated data. Circulator seamlessly integrates with any platform and automates your data collection. You can also access all customer information in a single customer view and subsequently use it to segment and personalise your email campaigns.
4. It’s hard to acquire new customers
The industry's competitiveness makes it hard and expensive to acquire new customers. The cost of customer acquisition can range significantly - from €462 for direct insurers to up to €854 for captive and independent based insurers.
According to our research, the average cost per click for search campaigns for insurance-related keywords ranges from €4.50 to €34. With an average conversion rate of 5.10%, the cost per conversion can be between €88 and €465. However, we’re still talking only about conversions. The cost per acquisition can be significantly higher. With the average revenue per customer being €850, the profit margins can be quite low.
Therefore, insurance brokers should look for ways to improve their customer acquisition without encountering any additional costs.
Solution:
Quote notification
Requesting a quote is a sign of showing interest in your products. You should always collect users’ email addresses and relevant information in this process and follow up with them immediately after. Quote notification will likely be the first touchpoint with your potential customers. Therefore make sure you include all important information and lead users to finalise the purchase or to contact agents on the phone.
Quote notifications gather all important information about your customers and policies and are automatically sent directly to your users' inboxes. They can also be scheduled as a series of messages that aim to convert quote requesters into customers. The entire process doesn’t require any input from your side. You can just wait for phone calls from leads and close the deals once the automation does its job.
New business chase
Your website visitors don’t always finalise the process of quote requests. There can be something in your forms that made them drop the form, or simply they didn’t have enough time. There can be several reasons for this happening, however you should always collect email addresses and send an automated quote abandonment notification reminding users about their quote.
Automation software identifies the visitors that dropped off the quote and sends them a message with an appropriate delay so that you don’t have to do anything.
These emails can recover up to 10% of lost quotes and increase your chances of successfully closing the deal.
5. Low customer retention
The same problem as in the section above emerges here. Acquiring new customers can be expensive. Acquiring a new customer can be 5-25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.
However, many insurance companies have problems retaining their customers as they don’t build a strong enough relationship with them and don’t convince them to renew their policies or purchase new ones. Therefore, retaining existing customers should be the top priority for insurers.
Solution:
Policy renewals
Policy renewal reminders are automated emails that are sent to customers once the renewal date is coming so that they won’t forget to renew their policies or switch to another provider. These automated emails are typically very effective and help improve customer retention.
It is recommended to combine email and SMS communication for policy renewals to increase the chances of successful conversion:
Example:
Cross-sell
It is easier to sell to customers who have already purchased your policies and have built a relationship with your business. You should take the opportunity to sell these customers more policies and ensure they remain loyal customers.
Automated cross-sell campaigns are one of the best ways of doing this. You can offer complementary products or complete packages with full coverage. It will also benefit both parties as it will make it easier for your customers to have all their policies with one company than for them to be dealing with multiple companies for different policies.
The most commonly used cross-sell campaigns are home x car or car x home, but the options are limitless, and you can combine any of your insurance products.
Example:
Up-sell
Upselling is similar to cross-selling with the difference of promoting the same product but with better coverage. Upsell campaigns work particularly well when combined with renewal reminders.
When insurance is due shortly, it is the perfect time to offer an improved policy to your customers. If they are satisfied with your services, there’s a good chance that they will accept your offer.
Example:
Circulator specialises in insurance communication solutions and provides powerful automation software to help its clients achieve the best possible results.
Please contact us if you’re looking to improve your digital communication. Our team will be happy to help you.
Visit our blog for more tips for insurance brokers.
