Unlocking information to boost agent productivity
At the center of any insurance business there are two people: the customer, and the agent who is serving that customer. For an insurance carrier to maximize the value of that relationship and sell more products, the agent needs to be able to see – and to act on – a full picture of the customer’s interactions wherever they are. Providing agents with a portal that combines customer information with productivity tools is the key to achieving that.
Look at it this way: an agent meets with a customer to provide a quote for home owner’s insurance. He opens an insurer’s portal on his tablet to generate a quote. But what if the portal, which worked fine on the agent’s office desktop, doesn’t work properly on his tablet? At best, this will slow down the sale, impact on profit and tarnish the customer’s experience. If the agent is independent, he may even abandon that carrier and instead sell a competitor’s policy through a portal that gives him all the information and tools he needs to complete the sale on the spot. In future, he will return to the portal that worked reliably and sell more of that carrier’s products.
If you’re a carrier, you need to provide the best agent portal possible to help your agents sell more of your products anytime, anywhere and on any device.
Insurance carriers have an increasing amount of customer data just waiting to be turned into insights that can enable agents to provide incisive, personalized and profitable customer service. That data is often stored in siloed back-end systems that create a fragmented picture of each customer – but it can be unlocked and made available through any device, providing critical tools to help boost agent productivity.
There are two approaches you can take to deliver that information. You could try rationalizing your back-end systems, but frankly that’s an expensive and time-consuming road to go down. A more efficient way is to consider a hub-and-spoke approach, implementing a platform that allows you to open those back-end systems and expose the data to agents through customer relationship management (CRM) technology – such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM – and portal technology at the front end – whether that’s on a desktop computer or any mobile device.
By exposing that data, the portal can deliver a 360-degree view of the customer, which is essential in enabling the agent to price their offer correctly, view the customer’s other policies and activities across the organization to assess risk, and generate insight so they can cross-sell and up-sell the products to suit that customer.
Having that 360-degree view of the customer is one thing. But agents also need to be able to develop their business by creating and tracking leads, creating offers that will capture sales, and communicating efficiently with customers. Incorporating productivity, communication, and collaboration tools such as Office 365 and Lync into the portal is vital to enabling agents to communicate effectively, generate more leads, and increase sales.
In summary, combining CRM, portal and productivity tools that agents can use on any device, delivers threefold benefits:
- you have a portal that can expose all the information from your back-end systems
- your agents have a 360-degree view of the customer
- you’ve enabled your agents to maximize their productivity using efficient collaboration and communication tools in the productivity platform.
By providing the best possible agent portal, you’ll also be giving your agents a better experience, encouraging them to return to the tools you provide and sell more of your product.
To follow up on this conversation and find out how you can maximize your agents’ productivity, please connect with your Microsoft account team who will be happy to discuss the possibilities with you.
