|Posted By: Confluency Solutions|Blog Home

Lack of Time or Lack of Process?

About a year ago I started randomly asking insurance agents about their new client onboarding communications, the kind of contacts they made with new clients post sale. The most common answer I got went something like this: they get a dec page and a bill from the insurance company. The second most common response was 'we send a thank you card in the mail'.

We all know the best time to ask for a referral, get additional account sales and get testimonials (or in today's language, online reviews) is immediately after that purchase decision. But those business building opportunities are usually missed for one reason: lack of time. So Confluency put a service together for our agency clients that nurtures new clients, asks for referrals and 'testimonials' and lets clients know what to expect from the agent-client relationship going forward, after that initial sale.

To that we have recently added an annual review component. All that took was tweaking the communication process a little and applying some automation to the initial fact finding portion of the annual review. The annual review delivers the same benefits as nurturing new clients along with improved account retention. Not only are reviews good for the business bottom line, but consumers want reviews. Consider this list from a 2012 PIA survey which asked personal insurance consumers what they wanted from their company or agent.

Insurance Consumers want:

  1. Value in the rates they find for me.
  2. Taking care of me and my insurance needs.
  3. Trust in the person or company.
  4. Quick service response.
  5. They will "go to bat for me" when necessary.
  6. Personal attention.
  7. They are able to offer me choices of coverage.
  8. They provide me with confidence that I am making the right insurance decisions.
  9. They are recommending sufficient insurance protection.
  10. They are able to offer me a choice of companies.

The numbers correspond to the importance rank of each response. Note that six of the top ten (bolded), and number two on the list, cannot really be delivered unless some kind of reviews are conducted on an ongoing basis.

But reviews are not offered for exactly the same reason new clients receive little follow up - lack of time. But is that really the reason for missed opportunity?

It occurred to me while we were adding the annual review component to our client communication services that we didn't have to find more time to include the review, we only had to tweak a process. A systematic process has a number of advantages over the heroic, fire-extinguishing acrobatics most of us perform everyday: it is repeatable, a process lends itself to quality control, a process can be automated and a process doesn't stop when the next crisis arrives at our doorstep. And most importantly, a process isn't demanding of our time. So when we say we don't have time for important services that benefit our agencies and are desired by our customers, are we really saying we just don't have a process?

Learn more about a process for annual reviews by attending a free webinar, Annual Reviews: Connecting the Dots on Thursday, April 21 at 2:30 p.m., EDT.

Sign Up for our Webinar

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