Columbus, OH – Strategic Insurance Software (SIS), providers of Partner XE, a leading agency management system for independent agents, today announced the upcoming release of Partner XE 2016.
This latest version reflects the ongoing collaboration between SIS and its client. The update promises to deliver improved agency workflows and efficiencies by reducing clicks and streamlining processes. Updates include multiple customer-requested features, including enhanced certificate and document management. (more…)
When you think of branding, what comes to mind? Perhaps you feel your agency has a solid brand, or maybe branding seems like a nebulous, confusing exercise.
No matter where your agency falls, defining and maintaining your brand is an essential part of insurance customer retention and prospect outreach. You need to know who you are and what value you provide before convincing others why you’re the best choice.
Insurance customer retention is a primary goal for most agencies. Although it’s much easier to retain customers than gain new ones, you need to do both to sustain your agency.
Quality insurance providers know what is at the heart of sales: relationships. Independent insurance sales in particular focuses on getting to know prospective customers, and connecting them with the coverage. True insurance sales is helping people get what they need.
A Powerful Sales Tool – Your Agency Management System
Successful salespeople use a variety of tools to convert opportunities and chances are, your agency has at least one of these tools: an insurance management system. The data input/output abilities of your agency management system, coupled with its ability to centralize information, makes it perfect for prospect conversion.
Harnessing the Prospecting Power
Your insurance management system allows you to capitalize on the key elements of sales: know your prospect, stay in touch, and be there when the time is right.
Know your prospect
Get referrals from current clients and connect records so you can cross -reference the relationship.
Synch emails directly to automatically generate records of what was said and when. Synchronization means that even replies are saved in your system.
Scan in paper artifacts such as handwritten notes or receipts from meetings. Save them in your system to document each point of contact.
Keep in touch
Keep notes on calls, emails, and meetings in one place to give a complete picture of all points of contact you’ve had with a prospect in a given time.
Set reminders to get back in touch. These can be a week, month, or years out depending on need.
Be there when the time is right
Look at records to see when a prospect replied to an email or picked up a phone call: this information tells you best contact times.
Access quotes as you’re speaking with a prospect. Providing them on the spot increases chances of conversion.
Use eSign plug-ins to send and sign contracts as soon as a prospect is ready to commit.
Other Insurance Management System Benefits
The reporting functions of your system are a huge asset to your independent insurance sales process. Read outs can show how often a prospect was contacted, by what means, and other pertinent information. And, it’s all easily exported to Excel so you can manipulate data and views as needed.
Centralized storage of prospect information is another asset. When information is recorded in your agency management system, it is tied to your agency, not the producer. This distinction is important – a producer could potentially leave your agency, taking all that hard earned data with them. In your management system, it’s accessible to your agency for years to come.
Partner Right
If your agency management system doesn’t have the above capabilities, talk with your provider. Find out what they can offer and ask about other ways to utilize your system to boost sales.
At SIS, we enjoy hearing from our clients, gaining insights into their areas of concern and adapting our Partner XE to their needs . Have an idea you’d like to share? Contact us – we’d love you from you!
This phrase has become commonplace – the answer for everything from “what are those song lyrics?” to “which car should I buy?”. The internet is now the number one source for information gathering and decision making. This means your insurance agency website design is critical: it is where most of your prospects and customers will interact with your brand. It may even be how they find you in the first place.
Your insurance agency website design plays an important role in gaining new business and retaining customers. So it needs to make an impact – and a positive one at that.
An effective insurance agency website is one that is attractive, informative, useful, and engaging.
Attractive
Use pleasing elements, such as a “sticky menu” that stays glued to the top or side of the screen. A sleek design– something clean and bright – provides a positive user experience. Stick to one or two colors and minimal graphics, all of which should communicate your agency’s brand. Less is more here. Don’t overload pages with text. Get to the point using bulleted lists or other methods to break things up. Finally, stick to one or two font styles as anything more makes your site seem chaotic.
Informative
People come to your agency website to learn: about your team, your services, and what makes you stand apart. Bring the most important information to the forefront such as links to your contact, about, services, and request a quote pages. Users should be able to navigate to these pages from anywhere on your site. Include a search bar at the top of each page to allow users to easily find the relevant information they need.
Useful
Your insurance agency website design must serve users’ needs. Prospective customers need access to online quotes and your service list, but they will also look for ways your site serves your current customers. Online payments, access to policy information, printable ID cards, and online claims processing are appealing. Any way to make service faster and more convenient is a plus.
Engaging
Users should be able to interact with your agency website, and access your agency through it – from anywhere, at any time, on any device. The first step is a responsive design, meaning your site will adapt depending on what is used to view it: phone, tablet, laptop, or another device. Adding social streams (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) increases users interaction. Finally, an interactive help center can help your customers troubleshoot issues faster. The ability to live chat with agents or get an immediate email response to resolve issues creates a positive user experience.
Other Marketing Resources
Your website is an important part of your agency’s brand and a valuable marketing tool. SIS has a multitude of resources to help you build your brand, including more tips on how to continually improve your online presence. Check out our other agency resources here, or contact us to find out how our team can help your agency grow.
Next in our series on what’s behind our Partner Platform insurance agency software community is the management and operations consulting group, Eisenhart Consulting Group. For over ten years, we’ve been lucky to work with owner Mary Belka and her team.
Mary Belka, CEO and founder of Eisenhart Consulting Group, has been part of the Partner Allies team for more than a decade. When she was first introduced to the Partner Platform system, she was impressed by the hands-on, personalized service the Partner Platform team provided to one of her clients. Since then, a mutual dedication to personalized service has made Partner Platform and Eisenhart Consulting the perfect team for our independent agency clients.
I spoke with Mary to talk about how she came to meet the Partner team, the unique and transformational service she brings to Partner agencies, and how she prepares agencies for the future.
We strive to provide the best insurance agency software to our Partner Platform agencies, but we don’t have all the answers on our own. That’s where our trusted technology partners, our Partner Allies, come in. In this series, we get to know more about our industry partners and how they bring innovation and expertise to the Partner Platform system.
Based in Nokomis, FL, Lightspeed Voice® is a VoIP, cloud-based IP telephone provider founded in 2009 to provide the insurance industry with reliable VoIP and client relationship management (CRM) solutions.
Lightspeed differentiates through high-touch and high-service, which aligns nicely with Partner Platform’s approach – and is also true for the way our independent agency clients sell. Both Partner Platform and Lightspeed strive to be hands-on, building relationships with clients just as our independent agents do with their customers.
I talked with Lightspeed’s VP of Sales and Marketing, Steve Mohr, about the partnership.
Have you properly equipped your insurance website for sales? Almost three-quarters of insurance shoppers go online to do research and obtain quotes, so you need a quality website to attract those sales.
This shift to online prompted our Partner Platform team to think more about agency websites and how to optimize them for sales and service. We now work with agencies to help them create a custom site to grow their business after seeing several common mistakes. Here are some of the ways we saw agency websites missing the mark – and how we helped them correct their missteps.
Columbus, OH – Strategic Insurance Software (SIS), providers of Partner XE, a leading agency management system for independent agents, today announced the upcoming release of Partner XE 2016.
Quality insurance providers know what is at the heart of sales: relationships. Independent insurance sales in particular focuses on getting to know prospective customers, and connecting them with the coverage. True insurance sales is helping people get what they need.
