Texting for Insurance Agencies
Communicating in the 21st Century and working in the clients’ comfort zone.
Because texting for insurance agencies is relatively new, concerns over E&O documentation, staff member responsiveness and accountability are holding some agencies back.. However, the insurance agents are finding more and more often that texting is often their clients’ preferred form of communication.
Experts argue that if clients want to communicate via text, agencies better get on board.
Pat Alexander’s article The Reality of Texting For Insurance Agencies, recently published by Agents Council for Technology (ACT), addresses agent concerns, puts forth a set of best practices and offers specific instructions for forwarding texts to email, sending texts from email and implementing an agency text address.
Best practices she lists are as follows:
- Do you want to be relevant to your client base? If so, then you must embrace this technology.
- Set standards and best practices. These really are no different than handling face-to-face conversations, phone calls, emails, etc. Your standard should be that all conversations with the client or with others about the client’s account are to be documented in the agency management system or the system which you are using to collect client data.
- Be pro-active and determine how to best receive texts at the agency level and educate your staff and clients.
- If your client and someone in your agency are friends, inevitably there will be a text on a person phone. Define, train and implement the process to get this moved to an agency level as quickly as possible.
We’d also add that texts should remain professional. Take care that words are correctly spelled, proper punctuation is used and make sure there are no typos.
