Why Your Agency Needs to Build a Client-Centric Journey
The insurance industry is all about people and relationships.
As an independent insurance agency, finding the right approach to serving your clients is what leads to loyalty, referrals, and retention.
There’s one thing that you should always be thinking about and considering when it comes to your clients: the experience they have with your agency.
The difference between customer support and a client experience.
When we talk about customer support and client experience, they sound similar, but they are completely different.
One on hand, you have customer support, which is purely reactive. For businesses that only operate from a customer support mindset, they wait for questions and issues to happen with clients before taking action, and don’t take measures to prepare for them.
As you can imagine, if your business model is set up like this, the amount of frustration clients might experience would be higher, especially if they need a problem to happen to the client for anything to be addressed.
On the other side, you have a client experience. This method to service is proactive in anticipating what clients might need beyond their initial inquiry, as well as offering guidance, resources, follow-up, and follow-through to ensure a client is taken care of from start to finish.
You can think of a client experience like a journey you are taking a client on, from the time they first sign up for a policy to when they are renewing for next year, and everything that happens in between.
Having a client experience, especially in the insurance industry, is not only expected by your clients, but it’s the way forward to combat poor service in other industries or from other companies, as outsourcing and complete automation take over more and more.
You can—and should—compete with larger entities that don’t prioritize customer care like you do at your insurance agency.
Take a holistic approach to your agency’s client experience.
To begin creating your very own client experience, you need to fully understand what their journey and your agency’s follow-up process look like now to identify where it can be improved.
In order to do that, here are some scenarios and questions to ask yourself about your insurance agency.
- When a client searches for your insurance agency online, how easy is it for them to find your contact information to reach out to you?
- Does your insurance website have your up-to-date phone number, email, physical address, and office hours?
- Do your online directory listings, like Google Business Profile, show the correct contact information?
- When a client contacts you, whether it’s by phone, email, text, or live chat, what is that experience like? Does a real person answer right away?
- Are there clear expectations set for clients who contact you after hours? Are there automatic responses or automated voicemail messages set up when your office is closed?
- What does the follow-up process look like to reach out to clients if a call was missed or placed after hours?
- Is your team trained to go above and beyond to anticipate clients’ needs when reaching out to them?
- Does your team know when to break the protocol process to maintain a seamless client experience?
With all of these questions in mind, you can evaluate each of your agency’s client interactions across teams to ensure that every touchpoint is seamless and supportive to provide clients with a great experience.
Harness the power of proactive engagement.
After identifying the current client journey your agency is providing, the next step is to truly understand the importance of proactive engagement. Simply put, instead of just reacting to client issues, you need a process in place for your entire agency to follow in order to excel at anticipating client needs.
This starts with training your team to know how to identify client needs and challenges before they arise. This is always something that can be in flux, but there are certainly common threads that you can pick up on and prepare your team to address concerns and go the extra mile.
Take rate increases for example. Many agencies have come to expect this question from clients, but by having a game plan to not only explain rate changes, but to be proactive about educating and informing clients on these, you can turn a stressful scenario into one where you can control the conversation and set the tone with clients.
To be proactive, you also should develop a process to regularly have your agency check-in with clients. Whether it’s on a quarterly basis or regularly, getting a connection from you as the agency makes a huge impact on a client, so that they feel like they are getting value from you as their agency beyond just having insurance policies with you.
In addition, going above and beyond sometimes means being over-communicative in some ways, which can be a good thing.
Agencies that answer a question for a client and then proceed to share helpful resources, tips, and advice show their clients that they are not just helping them with their issue, but they are getting ahead of potential future questions that simply result in back-and-forth or miscommunication.
You can prepare for this by having a resources page on your website, an FAQs section that you can easily refer to, or even by utilizing generative AI to help you quickly find and present helpful information and resources in a cinch.
Lastly, you need to create a process for your team to follow that prioritizes proactive engagement. Document this process so your team can follow it. The primary goal of this process should be to have your team asking clients about their goals in order to fully understand what clients might need and pre-emptively stay ahead of client concerns.
Map out your insurance agency’s client journey.
Creating a client experience is dependent on the ability of your agency and team to adapt to implementing new changes and adopting a client-centric mindset. This needs to have buy-in from the entire team, from leadership down, otherwise the structure won’t work.
This involves creating a foundational baseline that sets the standards for your team to follow for consistency in client communications. In order to do that, you need to meet with your team to walk through what currently happens with every client interaction.
Doing this exercise will allow you to identify gaps in consistency with client communications, as well as create opportunities to pinpoint key touchpoints that you can incorporate into your client outreach.
Now that you have what currently happens, along with your ideas for improvement, you can start mapping out exactly how the flow of client communications should be from when a client gets their first policy, when you send a welcome kit, when they file a claim, when you walk them through the policy renewal process, etc.
At every step of the way, you can map out those milestones to give you your agency’s client experience journey.
Be open to improvements.
After you create and implement your client experience journey, you need to be open to making changes that further improve your client’s satisfaction. One of the best ways to do this is to not only request feedback but also act on it.
You should welcome any and all feedback you can get, and not shy away from negative feedback. In fact, the negative reviews are arguably the most important, because it allows you to see a gap in service or quality that you can resolve with that client and adjust your process to prevent future issues.
In addition, any feedback you get should be responded to. This is part of the proactive process to get ahead of potential issues if you wait too long to reply to a bad review, or if you do not stay engaged with your clients who are promoting you.
Overall, as long as you have a client feedback strategy that takes a proactive approach, and you are open to critique, your agency will only benefit from it.
Take technology into consideration.
Taking a client-centric approach to your client experience might seem like a lot of extra work, and that’s probably the reason that is holding your agency back. The truth is, having a balance of technology and the human touch is precisely what makes a great client experience work.
By leveraging a variety of tools, you can stay ahead of client communications and be proactive in delivering service that goes above and beyond.
These start with your AMS, but the complete insurance agency platform needs to include the following:
- Smart marketing automation that syncs to your AMS database to send out messages and manage your book of business.
- An insurance agency website with built-in sales and service tools to take your client’s online experience to the next level.
- A pipeline management system to ensure leads and clients are taken care of and that your agency consistently follows up and reaches out.
- A reputation management tool that enables you to automate surveys for feedback requests and streamlines reviewing and responding to it.
- Business Texting and live chat functionality to make client communications more accessible.
If this sounds like something you are interested in, the great news is that Agency Revolution has this complete insurance agency marketing solution available to give you the framework you need to develop and deliver on the ultimate client experience journey.
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