Moving Your Agency to the Cloud – Extending the Power of Salesforce for Insurance Professionals
The insurance industry continues to dramatically change with many organizations shifting their focus to cloud technologies to meet changing consumer demands and improve business processes. Over the course of the summer, Revolution Group Salesforce Consultant Bill Malaska will highlight the keys to success for insurance professionals, and detail a variety of solutions within Salesforce that insurance professionals can leverage to improve productivity, increase sales, and more. Malaska is a seasoned insurance professional with over 20 years experience working in operations at a Fortune 500 insurance company. He joined our Salesforce consulting team in 2014 with a desire to assist insurance organizations transition to the cloud.
A new generation of insurance specific technology solutions that focus on the needs of carriers, brokers, and agents alike is evolving. These new solutions bring a variety of options to insurance professionals; particularly for agency and producer licensing.
The Insurance Industry is Changing – 3 Steps to Becoming Customer-Centric
With all of the bloggers and experts writing about the ‘changing insurance landscape’, I think we can safely say that it has changed and continues to evolve.
The insurance industry is a rapidly changing environment occupied by customers with a variety of expectations.
In a trade where firms are traditionally product-centric, customers’ use of digital platforms to research, buy and interact with insurance companies is shifting the focus to a customer-centric dynamic.
As customers utilize digital platforms to make buying decisions, they leave behind a trail of actionable data should be tapped. Insurance companies can now focus on who makes their best customers, and use the data to build products and strategy around specific segments of customers.
Changing the ideology of an entire organization seems like a formidable task to undertake. However, with a few easy steps, insurers can develop loyal customer relationships with insightful engagement. Here are three steps to growing a customer-centric insurance firm:
Organize Data Around the Customer
A customer’s journey is now a social journey exposing consumers to various channels and platforms. The digital journey influences 40% of consumer decisions made during the consideration phase. For insurance professionals, understanding the buying process and points of interaction enable you to provide the right information about products and services at the right time, helping to close more deals faster.
As you look to rebuild your data infrastructure, integrating data into a CRM system will bring valuable customer insight. From understanding how and where your customer interacts with you to bringing additional opportunities to the forefront, CRM is the hub of the relationship with sales, marketing and customer service information.
Bring Divisions Together in one Place to Collaborate
In order to meet customer expectations in the digital age, insurance organizations have to provide an integrated, unified customer experience throughout the entire customer lifecycle. From the consideration phase to the claims process, consumers expect a seamless experience.
Connecting teams throughout an organization in a CRM solution provides teams the opportunity to collaborate on sales opportunities, service cases, campaigns and projects. Insurance professionals can share knowledge, files and data anywhere at any time. This advanced collaboration positively impacts sales professionals, underwriting professionals, agents and producers, and claims management professionals.
Determine What Success is and Measure
In order to accurately measure data, you must have an idea of what success means to each division of the organization.
In each division, you will want to understand what you want your data to enable. Is it product growth, or closing quotes faster? And how you can pull that data?
Secondly, you must decide which data is useful and if there are ways to pre-fill applicant information in order to improve the process.
To make the most use of analytics and data, P&C Insurance professionals need to have a solid understanding of three key areas of analytics including descriptive analytics (what happened in the past or hindsight), predictive analytics (what is currently happening or insight), and prescriptive analytics (what is going to happen in the future or foresight).
Understanding your business requirements will enable your insurance organization to build and automate business processes helping to improve efficiency and performance.
As the insurance industry continues to evolve, staying on top of trends and best-practices, like becoming customer-centric, is essential for your organization. For more information about Salesforce for Insurance, please follow our blog series: Moving Your Agency to the Cloud – Extending the Power of Salesforce for Insurance Professionals. Call us at 614-212-1111 or fill out the form below.