Best Practices - Personal Insurance

Standard Business Situations

Objectives

  • Deliver client annual reviews, an important consumer need, with minimal cost and effort.
  • Generate additional policy and coverage sales from current customers.
  • Improve client retention by creating heightened awareness of agency at times when clients may be contemplating a change; insurancecompany research shows that the number one reason clients move their insurance is a second unexplained price increase.
  • Stay top of mind with at-risk clients (e.g., those adding a young driver, receiving a significant rate increase from the company, etc.)
  • Reduce staff training and management burdens by ensuring uniformity in insurance review process with a tool that is easy to use and simple to monitor.
  • Reduce exposure to Errors and Omissions loss.
  • Generate referrals and new client growth by making it easy for current agency clients to share the review process with others.
  • Develop and extend agency brand with repeatable services that are consistent across delivery channels.

Process Components

Set Up

Prospects need to have coverage needs reviewed when quoting; the Cipher@Fluent provides a quick and easy means for doing that. In the absence of providing a risk review the insurance sale devolves to a price game. Clients need to have their risk situation reviewed at least annually. In addition to the Cipher@Fluent, renewal clients should be offered @Fluent Update to determine changes in risk. Last, Cipher@Fluent and @Fluent Update can be used whenever a situation arises that results in significant premium increases.

  • Your agency's designated cATS Administrator will review the Cipher@Fluent and @Fluent Update questions and options along with the corresponding coverage suggestions. Changes to any of these will be made by the administrator via the cATS Administration Console.
  • Cipher@Fluent and @Fluent Update may be completed via phone or in person. In that case the agent would use the agent view and email a confirmation to the client. This technique would be used mostly for client initiated reviews.
  • A list of clients can be imported through the Administrative Console via an excel spreadsheet or other delimited format. Selection criteria based on this list will determine who will receive Cipher@Fluent and/or the @Fluent Update offer and when.
  • Similarly, a list of prospects can be loaded via the Administrative Console for an offer to have a risk review. These prospects can be financial service customers, commercial account customers or others.
  • Clients can set up their own IDs and passwords for accessing the client area of your agency web site. Once there, they may choose to complete Cipher@Fluent or @Fluent Update of their own initiative.
  • Many prospects will receive the Cipher@Fluent offer as a referral from an existing agency client or another prospect. They can set up an ID and password similar to existing clients. This ID will expire in 90 days unless renewed. Reminder emails will be sent automatically prior to expiration.

Follow Up

Clients must be confidant that they are in control of any follow up. If further contact regarding risk review is not requested and clients are contacted anyway, clients will be reluctant to refer others through Cipher@Fluent. This will negate the viral marketing power of the Cipher@Fluent. Clients are reminded of a number options for requesting follow up. All requests are captured in the cfluent Agent database so that agency management may assign to any CSR or producer for follow up.

Agency Management System Synchronization

Agencies with management systems can generate activities via criteria contained in an agency management system database. These activities can be captured in reports and exported to an Excel spreadsheet. This spreadsheet is easily imported into the Confluent Agent database and, with a few mouse clicks, any number of Cipher@Fluent or @Fluent Update offers can be launched.

Similarly, the outcome of Cipher@Fluent offer is tracked in the cfluent Agent database. These outcomes include:

  • No response by client
  • Cipher started but not completed
  • Cipher completed but no follow up requested
  • Cipher completed and follow up requested
  • Email no hit

Campaign reports can be run via the cATS Administration Console. These reports can be exported to Excel or other format for easy import to agency management system databases.

Additionally, the number of referrals each client makes to prospects via the Cipher@Fluent tool are tracked. Recent studies have suggested that client referrals are a powerful measure of client satisfaction and a key retention indicator.

Branding

The brand image created by Cipher@Fluent, @Fluent Update and other cATS tools with clients and prospects that use the tool is powerful. Brand awareness can be generated over a wide market area since the internet and email are not geographically constrained delivery mechanisms.

A brand image created with insurance carriers by the number of reviews the agency is able to conduct and the data about those reviews that can be obtained on demand. This means that the Cipher@Fluent and @Fluent Update are dynamic tools for acquiring desirable carrier contracts.