Automation: it's the future, and it's not about flying cars and self-cleaning houses. While customer service needs to have a human touch, automating parts of your customer service can actually enhance customer satisfaction. By creating easy solutions for your business through automation, you'll have more time to spend on real connections with your customers.
Make Your Website Work for You
Your website is one of the greatest insurance agency marketing tools, and it needs to work for you. While it can be simply a showcase of what you do, like an online business card, a website can be much more as well. Create areas where people can learn more about your area of business through blogs or by watching a webinar. Add online chat and portals for insurance customers where they can check their accounts. Develop landing pages for different groups entering your site so that you can speak directly to their questions and needs. An excellent website will save you and your customers a lot of time hunting for and asking questions.
Develop An Email System
Make sure that your website and your office have a way to capture your leads' email addresses. Use your email system to collect information about your leads' product interests by tracking what blogs and other learning resources are the most popular. Automatically feed this back into your customer database to enhance your ability to connect with your leads, improving your insurance agency marketing. Automate your emails as well, making sure that all new additions to your email list feel welcomed and letting them know about upcoming events or classes. Let your email system do some of the work of nurturing your leads.
Create Accurate Forms
Forms, forms, forms! Insurance agencies have so many forms, and you need to make sure that all of your client information is up to date. Use resources such as the American Agents Alliance's resources page to build forms such as disclosure forms, auto liability coverage, and broker agreements. Whenever possible, have your clients fill these forms out online so that they're easier to move and store.
Pursue Online Storage
Cloud-based storage has huge benefits to your company and allows you to forgo processes such as emailing files to each other or updating other employees about file changes. If you're not using cloud-based document management, you're probably spending a lot of time moving and managing documents that would otherwise be able to merge seamlessly into online databases or be shared by your colleagues. With online document storage, you can retrieve files easily wherever you might be. Even if you're on site with a client, you can get the most up to date information to serve that person better.
Set Up Easy Reminders
Look at scheduling and customer management tools to create an easy process for tasks that you complete every day. From adding a new auto insurance customer to annual reminders about insurance updates, many of your processes should generate automatically from your customer management tools. You don't need to know that a specific customer needs to renew a home insurance product. You just need to ensure that your customer management system sends out an automatic renewal notice instead, freeing you to answer customers' questions about insurance changes rather than looking through databases to send out renewals.
You're looking for support to build your insurance business. The American Agents Alliance can help. With our membership benefits and strong, networked community of independent insurance agency professionals, you'll find the support you need to bring your business to the next level.
