Your Insurance Agency Probably Could be Benefiting from Checklists in a Lot More Areas Than You Think

Checklists help us to avoid forgetting important things in many facets of our lives. As the intro pointed out, checklists are used in the context of complex projects or where an oversight could mean the difference between life and death. But we use checklists when we go the grocery or hardware store too and somewhere in between life and death (or E&O), or the mundane tasks that constitute our lives, there is a place for checklists for insurance agents.

Why should your insurance agency use checklists?

Playing defense is an obvious reason. Nobody wants an errors and omissions claim. But checklists can be the key to providing more uniform and better client service and improving retention and referral numbers, closing more sales, and getting new agency employees up to speed more quickly.

Here's just a few areas where checklists could make a difference along with a few examples.

• Choice in the sales process
• Annual Reviews
• Communication preferences
• New Hires/Exiting Employees

Choice in the sales process

We all know that price is always a consideration for consumers but it isn't the only consideration. In varying degrees of importance, consumers who are shopping for insurance also consider:

• Coverage options
• Customer service and support options
• Company reputation, trustworthiness and financial strength
• Ease of purchase
• Ease of claims process
• Policy customization and flexibility
• Transparency and clarity (what's included, what's excluded, how stable will premiums be)

A checklist in this case might consist of a simple questionnaire to assess the importance of each factor for an individual prospect. Then rather than show a slew of premium comparisons, you could winnow the options down to three or four. Studies show that when people are presented with three or or four purchase options they are more likely to actually make a purchase. Fewer options make it seem like there isn't really any choice and more options can overwhelm, that's why three or four options is the sweet spot.

When providing those three or four options it's important to explain why each was chosen based on what your checklist/questionnaire has told you about what the prospect values.

Annual Reviews

A checklist for annual reviews is really a variation on the checklist you would use when quoting a prospect. Too often annual review checklists seem like underwriting reviews with some obvious attempts at coverage upsells. You should review what is important to your client, as in the sales process checklist, as this often changes over time. You'll also need to add some checklist items to probe for discount opportunities as well as communication preferences. Following is a suggested checklist for homeowner insurance renewals.

Pre-Renewal Preparation

Communication Preferences

The reality is that consumers today want to use multiple communication channels when conducting business and many businesses, from the local dentist to the car repair shop, are using text, Facebook Messenger and Google Messages in addition to the more traditional email and phone options.

Your insurance agency clients, present and future, are texting with their accountant, using Facebook to make restaurant reservations and launching web chat sessions on business websites on Saturday morning.

Your agency has used email since forever by this point, is texting for some types of service interactions, and a growing number of insurance agencies are seeing and responding to a growing number of questions posted to Facebook and Google Messages.

There are different kinds of communications your insurance agency might send to clients but they fall into three predominant, overlapping categories:

• Transactional (billing and policy service) is an obvious one, clients need to know about coverage changes, claim progress or billing notifications.
• Educational communications are related to the kind of content you might post to your agency blog, share on social media or include in newsletters. The idea is to add value to client relationships by making clients aware of what insurance policies do and do not cover, coverage options available and safety and risk management tips, etc.
• Marketing communications are typically those contacts that are part of upsell, account rounding and cross selling campaigns.

Your clients may prefer to receive one or all types of communications via text, email or a social post. You won't know unless you ask. Some things to include in your checklist:

• Preferred communication option: text or email
• Preferred frequency
• General availability for meetings or phone calls

Remember, communication preferences can evolve over time, so it's good practice to check in with your client periodically. Be as flexible as you can and adapt your communication style to meet their needs. You may not always be as adaptable to your client's communication preferences as they might like but be sure to let them know when that is the case and why.

New Hires/Exiting Employees

This one might seem obvious, but we get a surprising number of emails or support tickets that sound something like this, 'please remove .<person's name> from accessing our website information, they left our agency a year ago'.

Clearly a checklist would have triggered someone in the agency to have the exiting employee removed from access to quote requests and website update powers upon their exit rather than a year later.

A comprehensive new hire checklist is going to be more extensive than an exit checklist. Obviously there is no training schedule to concern yourself with and 'cultural integration' is a moot point for an employee on the way out the door. But be sure to have a process in place to let clients know (if relevant) that the employee is leaving and who to contact for service in the future. Also, for those clients who don't 'get the memo' you'll want to have someone monitor and respond to the former employee's email for six months or so.

Following is a suggested checklist for homeowner insurance reviews.

Before the First Day