Why a CRM is a crucial tool for digital insurance brokerages

To stay competitive, the insurance industry requires the adoption of technologies that can better your services and make you more efficient. A Customer Relationship Management System (CRM) can do just that for your brokerage. By helping you organize information, learn about leads, and better your customer experience, a CRM simply makes you a better digital service provider.

In this post, we dive into what a CRM actually is and what it can do for insurance brokers.

What is a CRM?

How do you currently track all the information about your clients and potential clients? If you’re still using a spreadsheet, then it’s time to upgrade.

As its name entails, a CRM — or customer relationship management — this tool manages your clients. Your entire organization’s customer data can be kept in this one centralized, secure, and easily accessible spot. This removes the need to keep folders within folders for each client’s policy agreements and renewal dates.

Organize clients 

At its foundation, a CRM is an organizational tool. It lets you keep track of client information in a more organized fashion. One of these systems will help prevent documents from being lost or misplaced. Additionally, it can synchronize (often automatically) with tools such as calendars, commission calculators, and email inboxes. Imagine the tediousness of saving hundreds of email conversations into folders eliminated. Your CRM is able to do that work for you.

Accessibility is another way a CRM keeps you organized. Most CRMs let you access its system from your phone, laptop, or tablet. You can usually access it from your internet browser or through an app. Taking a specific example, Virtuous, a CRM solution popular amongst nonprofits, illustrates the power of specific CRM features. The top features of effective nonprofit CRMs, as demonstrated by Virtuous, work towards strengthening donor relationships, which is a critical facet for nonprofit organizations. This includes tools for enhancing donor connections and bridging your mission to your supporters. Their suite provides nine essential tools which further showcases the adaptability and importance of CRMs in diverse sectors, insurance brokerages included. A click of a button can reveal all the information you have on any client. Some even let you call clients from the system and logs the details of your call — such as date, time, and call duration. This means no more scrambling to find information on a client — it’s all in the palm of your hands.

Learn more about new leads

You can organize your current leads and discover trends about them through a CRM. There are many ways to do this. One is by using a CRM to generate a form on your site that interested individuals can fill out. All this information then flows directly into your system.

A good CRM also provides a profile on how warm your leads are. The system can inform you if an individual opened your marketing emails, read your website’s educational content, or had any interactions with an agent at your brokerage (this does, however, depend on the sophistication of your CRM system). This information ultimately helps you and your team convert more leads by knowing who’s really interested.

A lot of data about your leads and clients is in your CRM. That’s why many CRMs allow you to generate reports with this data. This can allow you to identify where to allocate extra resources. For example, you may discover that very few leads contacted your brokerage from a code you used on your traditional media ads while a significant number of people found you from social media ads.

Better your client service

78% of customers said they bought from whoever responded to their request first. This means that being responsive to interested prospects is critical to making a sale. A CRM can help you be more responsive by alerting you of new leads and reminding you to follow up with older ones. The second you pull up a client’s or lead’s profile, a CRM also shows you all your prior interactions so that you can tailor your next experience with them instead of re-learning what your client’s priorities and needs are.

Adding small things, such as the name of a client’s children into the system, can show a client that you care. One survey showed that 82% of customers stopped using a service because they felt a company didn’t care.

If your brokerage hasn’t considered using a CRM yet—opting for spreadsheets and burrowed folders, instead—now is the time to adopt one. A CRM system can help make your business more competitive by keeping your organized, letting you learn more about your incoming leads, and helping you better your customer service.