The year of 2020 has provided many negatives, which we won’t delve into here. It’s forced the hands of many businesses to embrace digitisation, such as independent retailers needing to do more business online. We take a closer look at what changes or improvements can be considered by insurance brokers to help provide growth and efficiencies.
A number of insurance brokers may already have a number of cloud based systems in place to trade, some parts of the business may still rely on dated methods. Whether you’re looking to reinforce the decisions you’ve already made, or you’re looking for options to hone your new focus, we hope you find these ideas useful.
Responsive Website
This may be an obvious one, but looking at the websites of some of the brokers we’ve reviewed, there’s still room for improvement. A huge number of people access websites using their smartphone device, it varies depending on the industry you operate in, but it’s not unusual to see between 40% and 60% of total users visit your site with a smartphone, and that’s whether or not your website is designed to cater for this traffic.
Not only are you making your website accessible and usable by another big chunk of your potential audience, search engines will look at you more favourably. The headline here is that smartphone compatibility is a ranking factor when optimising position on sites like Google.
Live Chat
Boasting a live chat facility gives your potential customers a less committal avenue to enquire, it means they can interrogate your service and solution without the resilience required to entertain a sales call or meeting. Having a live chat system isn’t a silver bullet, as it needs to be monitored by quick and knowledgeable staff. You often don’t have more than 20 to 30 seconds to respond to a live chat message before your user starts considering an alternative page or website completely. Operated properly, it can prove to be an invaluable tool for scooping up additional leads and providing next-level service to your existing customers.
Automation
There are several forms of automation that would be an advantage for the motivated insurance broker. Automating your new business pipeline and process is a good option, it keeps the pressure on whilst easing administrative burden. This type of automation can include the process that moves enquiries from website to CRM system, automates the follow up process for additional information from the client. Triggered communications such as client status update as record is updated in CRM. The process of introducing added benefits and additional covers post sale, all of these automations help deliver additional income with minimal burden.
