Why your insurance agency needs a CRM
Competition is fierce in the insurance business. Success often comes down to strong relationships, and relationships are built on trust. For insurance agents and brokers, that means understanding your customers at a deep level, so you can send timely communications, make relevant product recommendations, resolve claims quickly, stay on top of renewals, and create a great experience.
At the same time, every second matters. Slow responses and inefficient processes can send your potential customers to another provider. The bottom line is, you can’t deliver the prompt, personal service customers expect if you’re still relying on spreadsheets, file folders, and outdated software. You need a powerful tool to organize and manage your customer data, streamline processes, and deliver insights you need to convert more prospects into customers. That’s where a CRM comes in.
A CRM is a single platform software for insurance agents and insurance brokers that automates insurance processes and simplifies complex workflows. It can eliminate manual data entry and other tedious tasks, leaving agents free to address their customers’ needs. The best CRM for insurance companies can help agents organize potential clients, prospects and leads, can help with contact management within their book of business, manage policies and claims, and communicate with customers — without unnecessary delays. It can also help post-sale with claims management within the different insurance policies. It also improves agency efficiency by creating consistent processes and ensuring tasks are assigned to the right person.
How a CRM can improve your auto insurance business
Let’s look at a few of the many ways the key features of a CRM can help your insurance firm.
Centralized account management: Insurance agencies deal with a lot of data, including customer details, policy information, communication histories, actuarial figures, claim records, and more. A CRM helps you centralize all this data in a single system that can be accessed by any team member, at any time — providing a much deeper understanding of each account.
Pipeline and lead management: In a busy agency, it’s critical to know where every potential deal stands, and what steps should be taken to move each prospect forward. A CRM provides real-time visibility into your sales activity and the status, value, and pipeline stage of every account. Lead management functionality puts data at your agents’ fingertips so you can manage sales pipelines and business growth, and use custom workflows help them track, manage, and nurture deals more effectively.
Process automation: Tedious, manual tasks — and the inevitable human errors that come with them — can be a big drain on your agency’s resources. A CRM with sales automation can help you define specific processes and automate common insurance activities, like policy renewals, claim processing, and marketing campaigns — so agents can focus on the human elements of serving your customers.
Workforce productivity: In a complex business like insurance, it can be difficult to know where to focus your attention at any given time. A CRM provides integrated task management capabilities that can boost an agency’s efficiency and productivity. Each team member’s tasks are consolidated in a single view, serving as a systematic guide to the workday.
Reports and analytics: A CRM is the ideal software for insurance agencies because it helps with everyday agency management. It can provide detailed insights into every aspect of your insurance operations in your insurance agency, using customized dashboards and reports to make informed decisions about your business. For example, you might want to know which agents are more productive, how much business you closed last month, or which communications get the best customer response. You might want insight into which agents have the best client management practices. With this information, you can make real-time, data-driven decisions to drive better business outcomes regardless of your insurance sector.
3 CRM features life insurance agents value most
Almost any company can benefit from the addition of a CRM, but these are some of the most useful CRM features for insurance agents and brokers:
Workflow automation: Most insurance agents spend too much time on data entry, paperwork, meeting follow-up, and other tedious, manual work. These repetitive tasks are a serious drain on your agency’s productivity — and they keep agents from more profitable activities like winning new business. A CRM lets you automate tasks, build streamlined workflows, and define processes to be followed across your organization. Not only does this improve overall efficiency, it also ensures a consistent experience for every customer.
Email functions: Today’s insurance agents rely on email for most communications — including cold outreach to new leads, follow-ups with prospects, messages related to claims, and nurturing existing client relationships. A good CRM reduces the manual effort needed to organize and send email communications, by allowing you to create templates and automate messages based on pipeline status. You can also manage communications directly from the CRM, eliminating the need to bounce between multiple tools. The best insurance CRM will even track email metrics in real time and notify you when a message is opened.
Mobile app: Insurance agents are always on the go, but they can’t be out of touch when they’re away from the office. The best CRM for insurance will include a mobile app with all the functionality of the full CRM tool, so agents can:
- View dashboards from any location
- Keep track of calendar events and appointments
- Send and manage email communications
- Scan business cards and convert them to a CRM record
- Manage leads, opportunities, and contacts
- Access up-to-date customer information at any time
CRM options to support insurance agencies
Today’s insurance agents rely on a variety of industry-specific software tools, including specialized applications for different types of insurance. While a CRM is not a replacement for all insurance software, its robust functionality may allow agencies to streamline their tech stack and eliminate some single-purpose point solutions.
Insurance companies have many options for CRM technology, but every CRM solution is different. Some systems are expressly designed for the insurance industry, while others are flexible enough to support any type of business. Some attempt to solve all your software needs in a single product, while others are built to integrate with the tools you use every day.
Here are a few examples: Alpha Agent CRM, ProducerMAX, and MedicarePro CRM are software packages built specifically for insurance agents. While this may seem like an advantage, the feature set of these industry-specific systems is often limited, and customization can be costly. Because of their relatively small user base, it can be difficult to find expert consultants to help with things like system configuration and ongoing support.
HubSpot CRM claims that its CRM platform provides all the tools you need for marketing, sales, customer service, and content management. However, because it’s a closed system, HubSpot is most effective when your organization uses the entire platform. Once you outgrow one part of the solution, it becomes challenging to get full value from your investment.
Zoho CRM promotes its CRM system as a refreshingly simple solution with no hidden costs. However, it offers limited customization options and third-party integrations can be difficult. In addition, the Zoho suite is not built on a unified data platform — which means that individual apps within the product may not work together seamlessly.
Insightly CRM Insightly offers a modern, flexible CRM that’s simple to set up and built to scale with you as your business grows. Pipeline management and lead tracking tools provide a real-time view into where every deal stands so you can take the right action at the right time. Insightly’s unified data platform keeps your entire team aligned to deliver an outstanding customer experience. And with AppConnect, it’s easy to connect your CRM with other important business tools.
Why Insightly is the best CRM for insurance agencies
Insightly is the CRM of choice for modern, high-growth insurance agencies. Here are just a few of the many reasons why insurance firms choose Insightly:
- Insightly offers powerful, flexible functionality that can be easily customized to meet your unique business needs.
- Insightly’s workflow and process automation capabilities let you streamline repetitive tasks and reduce manual effort so your agents can focus on what matters most.
- Insightly provides centralized account management in a single database to easily collect, store, and manage customer data.
- Insightly’s built-in email functions let you manage all your communications within the CRM to ensure a seamless customer experience.
- Insightly’s robust data privacy and compliance features include SOC 2 accreditation, HIPAA compliance, EU/US Privacy Shield and GDPR compliance, sophisticated encryption, and more.
- Insightly has powerful analytics tools, including customizable reports and dashboards to enable smart, data-driven decisions.
- Insightly’s easy-to-use mobile app keeps agents connected from anywhere, with real-time access to customer data, dashboards, calendars, email functions, and more.
Insightly is built to handle the complexities of the insurance industry — and it’s designed to grow along with your company. Start with Insightly CRM and leverage the power of Insightly AppConnect to integrate with your existing databases, calendars, chat tools, accounting systems, and more. As your business expands, you can add Insightly Marketing for lead generation and management, or Insightly Service to help with customer support.
