This year continued a trend of technology’s growing influence in the insurance market and all industries at large. We saw a shift where more clients embraced agency software and integrated it into their regular systems and processes. This growing interest and influence prompted our Partner Platform and SIS teams to ramp up our tech focus, including several blog posts on this highly relevant topic.
Prospecting in any industry takes a combination of the right “stuff” (technology, data, people) and the right execution (systems and processes). Though it may be tempting, purchasing the best insurance prospecting software isn’t a solution on its own; you and your team need to understand how to leverage it.
We’ve worked with countless agencies to help them get their insurance prospecting software to work with and for them. Here are some common pitfalls we see in agencies struggling to put their software to work.
The year 2020 was unique in many ways, one of which was how the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the use of technology across industries. This was just the beginning. We continue to see insurance software emerge as a decisive factor among agencies. Many...
When your focus is community-minded, personalized insurance, it can be challenging to translate your skills to sales, marketing, and lead management. It can seem like a herculean task to figure out an insurance CRM and how it can help you identify and gain your ideal customers, growing your book of business.
When everyone in your agency is doing two, three, or more jobs, how can you manage to keep up with sales and marketing, too?
Our Partner Platform agencies can attest that it’s easier than you think. With our integrated management system and insurance CRM, we take the guesswork out of creating and managing customer and lead profiles in a CRM system. When everything is linked in one place, you can leverage the sales and marketing power of an insurance CRM with relative ease.
You know data is valuable. It’s what we use daily to make decisions, and it’s what we use to measure our successes. But are you using data effectively in your agency?
A wealth of insurance tech is available to capture and manage data, and the coronavirus pandemic accelerated data use in the insurance industry. According to a survey from Insurity, over 80% of agencies plan to “invest more heavily in data and analytics” following the 2020 pandemic outbreak. And with good reason – Willis Towers Watson found that over 66% of agencies say data analytics helped them reduce expenses, and 60% say it helped increase sales.
How can you better use data in your agency?
Part of what makes our Partner Platform agency management system and insurance CRM so robust is the partnerships we foster with insurance tech companies. Our Partner Allies specialize in their arenas, from esignatures to comparative rating and more, each Partner Ally hones their technology to serve agency needs.
Our Partnership with Exago and Exago BI
Today we highlight our longstanding partner, Exago. Exago specializes in building and delivering customized business insights with intuitive reporting and dashboards that anyone can use. After designing and implementing our own BI ad hoc reporting system, we found it too cumbersome and confusing for our Partner Platform agencies. Acting on our spirit of innovation and efficiency, the team knew it was time to look for an expert to work with and for our community.
Gaining and retaining customers is a big deal in insurance. When you have a diverse, loyal book of business, you are set to grow and try new things in this evolving digital insurance landscape. In fact, according to the Harvard Business Review, retaining just 5% more customers can boost profits by 100%.
How can you bring that kind of growth to your independent insurance agency?
Know What Your Customers Want
A surefire way to retain customers is by giving them what they want. The same goes for gaining quality leads – give the people what they want!
Our next “Behind Our Insurance Agency Software” series focuses on encrypted email and signature provider RPost. Based in Los Angeles, CA, the team at RPost operates in the U.S., the U.K., and more than 100 countries worldwide.
Formed in 1999, RPost filled an emerging need in online communications. While the convenience of email made it the dominant form of business communications, the team at RPost saw a worrying trend in email security. Organizations were sending sensitive information via the web and needed to protect it.
RPost stepped up to fill that gap between convenience and security, adding legal verification to email content and attachments through encryption technology. I talked with RPost’s VP of Business Development, Jake Finnell, about how RPost brought its powerful encrypted email and esignature services to SIS and the Partner Platform community.
Comparison quoting, esignatures and e-doc processing, and other digital insurance software tools have vastly improved personalization and customer service in insurance. It’s also becoming clear that these tools are also making agencies more vulnerable to cyber-attacks. According to the Identify Theft Resource Center, cyber-attacks increased by 42% in the first quarter of 2021, affecting an estimated 51 million people.
As a community-minded, independent agency, you can’t afford to expose your customers to that risk. Not only would it affect you financially, it would also damage your reputation in the community. How can you keep your customers and agency protected?
The evolution of sales as a software (SaaS) has dramatically changed the software landscape. Thanks to their easy-to-integrate nature, more businesses use SaaS applications over desktop software to improve operations. A 2019 report found that companies with less than 50 employees had, on average, 47 SaaS apps in use across their organization.
This SaaS revolution takes shape in the insurance industry with insurtech. Based in SaaS, insurtech provides streamlined operations through integrated solutions. While agency owners recognize the benefit, many ask how to incorporate insurtech – do they implore their management system providers or take on the integrations themselves? The answer lies in what it is you as an owner want for your agency.