Key features & benefits of insurance CRM
Now that we’ve explored the importance of CRMs in insurance, let’s take a look at some of the major features of insurance CRM tools and how they can help you scale your insurance business while making your agents’ lives easier.
1. Centralised customer data
CRMs bring all your customer and prospect communication under one roof. Whether it’s phone calls, emails, notes, or other policy documents, you can find all data related to the customer without having to scour loads of files.
As a result, you can easily see the history of the customer’s interactions with your insurance agent and personalise your offerings for them. Additionally, you can segment individual clients based on their coverage types and policies so your agents can quickly retrieve information about specific policies. Ultimately, this allows you to offer better, more targeted solutions for improved customer satisfaction.
Centralised customer data enables you and your insurance agents to easily access key customer information remotely so you can convert prospects, even on the move.
2. Sales pipeline management
CRMs also help you with the sales process. As your sales reps have all the details they need about a lead at their fingertips, they can smoothly drive the conversation forward and move them closer to conversion.
Additionally, CRMs like Act! give you a detailed look into your sales pipeline. By visualizing your sales funnel, you can figure out the stages where your leads are dropping off and take corrective actions.
You can also take a dive deep into your sales pipeline by filtering it for location, sales stage, product, and more. This helps you get detailed insights into the more important customer segments to drive more conversions. Such granular insights help increase conversions and minimise expenses as you focus your efforts on prospects who are likely to convert.
3. Marketing campaign personalization
Using a CRM, insurers can also drive their marketing efforts. Armed with data on your customers, you can send out personalised email marketing campaigns that help you drive conversions. These insights can also help you engage your existing customers, reducing churn and increasing your customer lifetime value (CLV) through upsells and cross-sells.
Most CRMs with integrated marketing automation allow you to build landing pages and web forms to drive your lead-generation efforts. These can help you attract inbound leads, which you can then nurture to drive more insurance policy renewals and sales.
4. Workflow automation
Automation can reduce your workload dramatically by eliminating the need to do repetitive tasks. It can even help you engage better with your customers. For instance, many prominent CRMs offer automation features such as email campaign automation, which helps you send targeted, personalised emails to your prospects and customers based on their actions.
You can even send ad-hoc email blasts or trigger-based emails to prospects by leveraging email templates and social sharing features to supercharge your marketing efforts. For instance, with an integrated CRM and marketing automation solution, you can send renewal and expiration notices automatically.
And, automation features also extend to the CRM workflow and automate lead scoring so you can prioritise the leads that are likely to convert. Additionally, this integration lets you easily assign actions based on customer engagement so you and your insurance agents know exactly what needs to be done.
5. Analytics
Analytics is another essential feature of any insurance CRM. The best insurance agency CRMs give you in-depth insights into your agents’ performance and show you where your marketing and sales strategies are taking the agency They also give you an idea of how well you’re retaining your existing customers with renewals.
For instance, a built-in dashboard shows real-time analytics with metrics that help you track your business and insurance agent performance. The real-time insights into marketing and sales can nudge you to take steps to drive more policy sales and boost business growth.
Additionally, dashboards with real-time insights show your business health over a certain period, while providing projections for future performance based on past metrics. These simple metrics can help you take steps to improve business health.
Some of the other key metrics you can track include:
- Revenue vs. costs
- Average number of days in a stage
- Reasons for opportunities you’ve lost
- Won vs. lost sales
- Forecasted sales (by product and agents)
- Individual insurance agent activities
6. Task prioritization
Tracking your interactions with a handful of customers as a single-person sales team may work manually. However, the process gets complicated when you have multiple insurance agents dealing with hundreds of customers at once. Manual follow-ups and appointment tracking might lead to missed appointments, which could mean a drop in sales.
An insurance CRM helps you create a list of tasks sorted by priority so you and your insurance agents always know what they need to take up next during their workday. Additionally, it provides notifications and alerts for key tasks. This ensures that your agents don’t miss out on any important follow-ups that might have led to prospects dropping out of your sales funnel.
7. Integrations with other tools
You might use several platforms to connect with your customers and drive your business operations. From email to messaging tools and calendars, you may have numerous existing tools in your tech stack.
CRMs can help streamline your business processes across these tools by effectively integrating with them. Not only does this eliminate the need to switch between different tools to get the job done, but it also helps extend the functionality of your CRM.
For example, most CRMs seamlessly integrate with your calendar and email so you can keep tabs on all your conversations and appointments from within the platform. The CRM will notify your insurance agents of any upcoming appointments or follow-ups so they never miss out on them.
Additionally, CRM integrates with social media, communication, sales, e-commerce, accounting, and customer service tools.
From viewing your e-commerce platform’s order history to adding new contacts whenever you get new followers on Instagram, the integrations automate important functions that can drive your insurance business forward.
