Many insurance agencies struggle with building strong ongoing relationships with their clients. And for that reason, the relationship between an insurance company and customers suffers. In fact, client retention may plummet just when they begin to scale.
But hiring a skilled virtual assistant can dramatically boost teamwork and productivity. Bringing a good VA on board has reverberating effects throughout the organization, especially for your customer relationship management.
In part 1 of this two-post series, we focused on factors influencing client retention — and drivers of turnover. In this post, we’ll take a deeper dive into how to strengthen customer relationships to increase their loyalty. You’ll learn how to improve customer service in insurance and deal with the inevitable challenges that arise, as we’ll discuss next.
Challenges with CRM for Insurance Agencies
When staff are overwhelmed, insurance customer relationship management suffers. It’s that simple. Maybe you’ve built great relationships with your first handful of customers, but as you’ve grown, you’ve struggled to maintain those connections. That’s a common scenario. As staff grow busier, they have more limited touchpoints with customers, which can lead to distance. Communications may be rushed, impersonal, and too infrequent.
The challenges you face may involve broad, sweeping issues as well as company-level pain points. Here are a few outside factors that might affect your CRM:
- The Great Retirement: Like many industries, insurance is facing sizable workforce shifts. Boomers are retiring in high numbers, with fewer people to replace them.
- Inflation: Along with other outside factors, inflation can affect insurance rates, challenging customer loyalty.
- Technological changes: With advancements in technological tools, consumers have higher service expectations. They expect quick answers through user-friendly channels.
Of course, internal challenges are common too. Within your company, you’re likely receiving high volumes of service requests. Prompt service and convenience are crucial, but how do you offer these things when staff already have a lengthy task backlog?
For many companies, hiring a virtual assistant is the solution. But strategically leveraging your VA’s skills is key. Let’s talk about how to do that next.
Strengthening Customer Relationship Management with a Virtual Assistant
The relationship between an insurance company and customers is central to success. So, how to strengthen that relationship?
Hiring a skilled VA elevates the customer experience. Outstanding insurance customer relationship management begins with providing the highest-quality service, and a VA will help you do just that.
A high level of trust, satisfaction, and communication is essential to strengthening client loyalty in the insurance industry, research has shown. The level of service your team can offer with a skilled VA will enhance each of these factors substantially. As you improve their experience, you’ll also increase operational efficiencies, strengthening your bottom line even more.
Here are a few key ways in which a VA will help you impress clients:
- Prompt, knowledgeable support keeps clients engaged.
- Transparency about rate increases avoids unpleasant surprises.
- Reclaimed time for nurturing prospects leads to a higher quality of service.
- Personalized offers deliver more value.
- increased check-ins foster stronger relationships.
Clients will have more confidence in your team as your level of service increases. When each team member can focus on their core strengths, you’ll demonstrate a heightened level of professionalism that impresses clients with each interaction. You’ll end up with more capacity for generating new business as well.
Customers’ heightened satisfaction with their level of service will lead to greater retention. Typically, our clients see retention increase by 8–12%. In turn, improving your CRM will also increase referrals to clients in your target market.
When it comes to client relationships, a VA can be your greatest competitive advantage. Let’s explore how this works in more depth.
Boosting Team Autonomy
On a typical team, tasks often become bottlenecked. Leaders and managers end up with a backlog of tasks that don’t use their core skills. People wait for someone higher up to make minor decisions that they probably could’ve made themselves.
But when you establish solid processes, people can take the reins to handle daily challenges. When you empower each person to own a specific role and focus on their strengths, work will flow more smoothly. Redesign how the work gets done by building autonomous teams focused on specific segments of the business, like sales and renewals.
This begins with weeding out groups of tasks that current staff aren’t good at. Also look at redundant tasks that different staff are handling. Then combine similar responsibilities into a new role that a virtual assistant can step into. They’ll handle these tasks with skill and professionalism, ramping up the whole team’s productivity.
Nurturing Prospects
Putting a VA in charge of admin work will give sales staff more time to focus on nurturing prospects. Instead of chasing paperwork, your skilled sales staff can focus on building connections with clients. They’ll devote more time to designing personalized offers, delivering more timely service as well. All of this will boost your credibility and build trust.
Again, this can happen through a reorganization of roles. Talk with sales staff and other employees about which tasks leverage their strengths — and which ones don’t. Then, redesign roles accordingly. Consider hiring a VA to support your sales team by handling data-management and follow-up tasks, if you’re making a high volume of sales.
Providing Structured Onboarding
Through a solid client onboarding process, you’ll impress new clients and build credibility. A VA can support this process, ensuring you don’t miss any steps. Results like these will impress new clients:
- Quick quoting speeds
- Prompt responses to queries
- Fewer processing errors
When clients have a great onboarding experience, they’ll be more likely to stay with your firm.
Designing Personalized Offers
Having a VA dedicated to renewals can lead to specific insights about customers’ needs. A renewals team supported by a skilled VA can provide a higher level of service in these ways:
- Policy review notifications
- Reminders of benefits they already have
- A strong mix of bundled offers
By improving file organization, a VA can support the team in designing tailored offers. This will help the team more fully meet clients’ needs. Clear communication and assurance that you’ve reviewed all the options with them will boost client satisfaction. Consider implementing a loyalty program as well — incentives for sticking with you for a specific period of time.
Through customized offers, you’ll take advantage of cross-selling opportunities that match clients’ needs. It’s a win-win. Across the board, your team’s productivity and accuracy will increase, and you’ll have more bandwidth for brainstorming creative offerings.
Having a dedicated account manager who clients can build a relationship with will foster trust. Appoint someone to this role, and then rely on your VA for supporting tasks.
Prioritizing Continuous Engagement
increased check-ins with clients will foster stronger relationships. According to McKinsey, insurance companies interact with clients an average of once or twice per year (in contrast to 10–20 times in other financial services areas like banking). Communications are often disjointed, too, they note — 40% of customers interact with two or more staff, one in six receive no follow-up after an initial conversation, and the switch to a digital platform can feel clunky or confusing.
Customer engagement shouldn’t begin when the policy term ends. Instead, reach out periodically throughout the term. A VA can act as a continued point of contact for clients, responding promptly and politely to requests. And follow these best practices to improve client interactions:
- Look at when and how they prefer to be contacted. Does a given customer respond when contacted by email but not when you leave a voicemail? Track these preferences over time, inputting the data in their profile, and leverage what you’ve learned.
- Provide a consistent experience across platforms. Make sure your messaging and communication style are similar across your website, customer portal, mobile platform, and direct communications, creating a strong brand image.
- Reach out proactively instead of waiting for customers to contact you. Don’t bombard them with emails, but try to reach out on at least a quarterly basis with an update, offer, or simple check-in. Use a spreadsheet to track the type of communication you engaged in, when you reached out, and the response you received.
- Send customer satisfaction surveys every once in a while. Make them quick (a handful of questions they can answer in a few minutes or less) and easy.
A VA can help with monitoring customer engagement data and handling support tasks like sending out surveys. By tracking customer preferences, they can help your renewals team improve engagement.
Foster Organic Growth with Strong CRM
Organic growth happens by cultivating strong relationships with clients. When they trust you, they’re far more likely to refer friends, family, and colleagues to you. Plus, they’ll turn to you for all their insurance needs rather than just one or two. Instead of price-shopping for each need, like car and home insurance, they’ll opt for a package deal.
So, make sure you’re offering ways of bundling services in a format that clients can easily access. Offer information on how to bundle services on your client portal, for instance, and make sure staff are prepared to discuss this one-on-one with clients.
Each customer’s net promoter score will rise when their satisfaction improves. They’ll become advocates for your brand — and more business will come your way through word of mouth. Consider sending prompts that boost referrals, such as an announcement of an incentive program for referring friends or family. This can have a snowball effect that keeps new business coming in.
Many companies wonder how to improve customer service in insurance but never take concrete steps to do that. Set yourself apart from the crowd by bringing a skilled VA on board. By focusing on processing data and paperwork, then keeping your documentation in order, they’ll allow their team members to devote more time to building relationships and keeping customers happy.
To talk more about how an experienced VA can enhance your customer relationship management, set up a discovery call. We’ll chat about your specific needs and how a VA can help solve the challenges you’re experiencing.