One of your goals as an insurance agent should be to provide good customer service. That’s beyond dispute. But it gets tricky when quality customer service threatens your already precarious profit margin. 

The fact is that if you can’t turn a profit that allows you to cover your expenses, you wont be able to afford to stay in business for long.

With the help of specific tools that can help you gather data and take appropriate action, you can dramatically increase your insurance agency’s profitability while simultaneously improving the service you provide to customers.

Here are three ways to do it:

1. Measure your profitability

Do you know how profitable your customers are for your brokerage? The answer may surprise you. While you might think that the larger customers that require a lot of time to bring into the brokerage are your big money-makers, this may not necessarily be the case.

Lets say you have a huge potential customer, but you have to make a number of sales calls in order to write a quote, and the customer is taking their time making a decision to buy a policy. All this time spent with no reward digs into the agencys profit.

Now lets say that, once you have hooked the big fish and the policy is signed, the customer turns out to be a needy one who takes up a lot of your time with questions and concerns. While nurturing the relationship is part of your responsibilities, it is also a factor to consider when calculating the profit earned from the customer.

The most efficient way to stay on top of the profitability of policyholders is to use sophisticated software with the capability to track it efficiently. Novideas Insurance Portfolio Profitability Analysis feature can provide in-depth analysis of the time, effort and resources your agency has invested in the insurance portfolio versus the revenue it generates in return. Based on the data presented by the software, you will be in a better position to make decisions that will help increase profitability.

2. Monitor efficiency

You need to look at your current procedures and the productivity of your staff if you want to increase your agencys profitability. By examining how your staff works, you will be able to see areas that are properly functioning as well as those that need to be tweaked or even completely overhauled.

Novidea Insight tracks the amount of time staff spends working on policies, applications and records. This data, when used in conjunction with an integrated expenses management module, gives managers a snapshot of employee performance with respect to customer profitability.

Novidea Insight makes the process of going from providing a customer with a quote to making an insurance application a streamlined one. It gives you the capability to manage sales of several insurance products in one transaction. Insight can also compare proposals from multiple carriers, as well as confirm that new policies and renewals have been issued.

3. Use actionable, data-driven insights

In addition to using data to analyze agent efficiency and to make better business decisions, data intelligence can also help an agency drive sales from existing customers to increase profitability.

By having easy access to information and receiving automatic notifications with actionable insights, insurance brokers can upsell additional policies to customers that will actually be of use to them. Not only does this improve the customer experience and build loyalty, but it also helps brokers generate more revenues from their existing client base. Remember: its approximately five times more cost effective to sell to a client who already knows you than to find new customers. Plus, sales can be closed more quickly and efficiently when they involve a customer who is already familiar with your agency.

The new Actionable Business Intelligence module from Novidea can give you all the information you need to provide customers with a tailored service, sell more policies and increase profitability.

Heres how it works:

  1. When a broker is speaking with a customer on the phone, he simply enters the customers name into the platform.
  2. A message indicator will pop up showing that cross-selling opportunities have been found which fit the customers portfolio analysis.
  3. The broker can see the suggestions and open a new product lead on the platform.
  4. The broker can then integrate the new product into the conversation with customers by asking whether them if they realize that they have a gap in coverage in that area.
  5. The goal is to get customers interested in hearing a presentation about the features and benefits of the financial product and to make them interested in receiving a quote for coverage.

Novidea allows brokers and agents to excel in the operational and customer service aspects of the business. As a result, brokers and agents can take action to cross and upsell products to customers, boosting profits along with their customer retention and renewal rates.

 

Would you like to learn more about Novideas solutions and how they can help increase your insurance agencys profitability? Contact us for a free consultation.