What if you could predict the future? What would you do with what you know?
Well, in a way you can… for your agency.
It’s been said the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. With customer insurance data analysis, you can look at how your insured have behaved and use that information to grow your client base. But you need to be careful. Spotty data leads to inaccurate readings and bad predictions.
Tracking Customer Data
Chances are you already have access to all the customer information you need; it’s just a matter of intentionally tracking it. Utilize your agency management system to strategically capture:
- Customer engagement: how often you interact with your customers and how they engage with your marketing efforts. Your management system’s notes feature and email integration are handy here.
Get more tips on how to improve your agency’s marketing here
- Referrals: know where referrals come from (online, in person, via a specific marketing campaign) and when they happen. Paying attention to cycles of when more referrals come in helps you capitalize on opportunity.
- Policy renewal dates: too many agencies lose customers simply because they weren’t paying attention. Know when your customer’s policies are up for renewal and give them some extra communication and support to guarantee they stay. Do the same for prospects, tracking when their policies are up and reaching out at just the right time.
- Customer milestone dates: add birthdays, anniversaries, and other important dates to your customer profiles. Set reminders and send a celebratory email or card. This small gesture helps build your connection.
- Premium/commission amount: getting a read on customer premium or commission amounts helps you prioritize your development approaches. It doesn’t mean paying attention to some customers while ignoring others, but instead aids in putting the right amount of resources into each customer connection.
Keeping Data Clean
After you set a plan in place to deliberately capture customer information, you’ll need to ensure the data you’re working with is clean. Follow these tips to keep your customer info up to date and accurate:
- Keep daily policy and commission information accurate and correctly matched with daily policy downloads
- Stay on top of manually entered/non-downloadable policies
- Ensure cancelled and rewritten policies are adjusted to reflect the correct transaction type, ensuring New Business reports are accurate
Read more on why it’s important to be strategic about your data entry
- Set up regular data checkups, going through your data in chunks and cleaning up any issues
Reporting on Customer Data
Once you have your customer data tracked and clean, you can use it to generate reports. These reports are your key to planning an effective marketing and retention strategy for your agency.
Your agency management system should have standard and customizable ways to report on your agency data. If you’re not familiar with your reporting features, now is the time to learn!
At a recent Partner XE training, we covered this important topic, helping our agency partners understand how to pull data to best serve their individual agency. You can check out more of our training offerings on our website or get in touch to see how SIS and Partner XE can serve your agency’s needs.
Sarah Deak has been contributing to the SIS team since 2013, covering topics like agency perpetuation, workflow improvements, data security, and marketing. She has a background in small business, working with organizations to improve their online presence and client engagement. Sarah also writes for the SIS newsletters and website, and counts herself lucky to hear from our many passionate, hard-working clients for our client stories. Her favorite part about working for SIS are the dedicated, service-minded people.