Laying The Groundwork for an Effective Annual Insurance Review Program: Preparing Your Agency
If you haven’t had a consistent customer insurance review program in your agency, there might be some logistical details you haven’t considered.
It’s not quite as simple as making a few calls, setting appointments with the majority of your customers, and them coming into your office ready to be cross-sold to.
Following the tips in this post will help you to lay the groundwork for a successful annual insurance review program in your agency.
Set Goals & Intentions
If you don't have a vision for your annual insurance review program, chances are, you won't see much growth or results.
Ask yourself: Why are you deciding to hold regular customer insurance reviews with your clients?
Regular reviews are beneficial to your customer in many ways.
They can feel a peace of mind knowing that their coverage is adequate for their lives. They could also save money with discounts or bundling options.
A review also gives them the chance to understand their coverage more thoroughly.
So maybe your vision or intention for these meetings is to better protect and service your clients.
As for your agency, regular reviews with current customers help you to improve retention, identify cross-sell opportunities, and obtain referrals.
The potential for these results is a source of motivation for many agents to hold these appointments.
Make sure that along with a general vision and intention, you also have specific, measurable goals for the program.
Here are a few examples to get you thinking:
Increase retention by a certain percentage
Receive X number of referrals each month
Ask for referrals at least once during each appointment
Your measurable goals - like number of appointments, retention rate, referrals received - should reflect your current book of business.
The most successful insurance agencies invite every customer in for a review each year.
How many people will you need to invite each month to make sure you get through your book of business in the year?
Since we’ve been setting appointments for insurance agents for over 15 years, we’ve learned a lot and have actually developed a formula to help you figure out how many appointments you should be setting depending on the size of your book of business and your retention rate.
Click here to give us some basic information so we can run the numbers for you and send you a Customized Customer Insurance Review Plan made just for your agency.
The plan will show you exactly how many…
Appointments you should set each month
Customers to be contacted each month
Phone calls made per month
Calling hours each month
Dials per hour your caller should be making
It will also give you a detailed outline for your entire annual insurance review program so you don't miss any small details.
Appointment Setting
To get a certain number of appointments each month, you’ll need to make a plan that answers the following questions:
How many calls does it take to get that number of appointments?
Who will be calling?(will you be hiring a part time caller, having your current staff do it, outsourcing to a vendor like Engagex?)
Having one of your staff members set these appointments is a totally viable option.
If you decide to go that route, you’ll also need to consider how you'll handle the following:
Write/identify a script for the phone calls
Come up with rebuttals for common objections
Training the staff member
Utilize a click-to-call software
Purchase a hands free headset
Establish a calling schedule
Come up with a “Plan B” for setting appointments when your caller is sick, on vacation, etc.
Establish a reminder/confirmation call process.
By outsourcing to a vendor like Engagex, you won’t have to worry about these things, because we already have the tools and process in place.
Each agency is unique - some agencies find great success setting their own appointments and others prefer to use an outside vendor.
Obviously, we prefer you to use Engagex to set these appointments (we are a business after all), and it usually ends up being more cost-effective, but like I said before, it’s totally do-able to set appointments in-house if you're willing to put in the extra effort.
Some of our customers actually use our services to call their harder to reach clients while their in-house callers reach out to others.
Finding what works best for your agency is something only you can do.
Ensuring The Effectiveness of Appointments
It’s not enough to just set X number of appointments and hope for a good outcome.
You need to know how to run these meetings effectively so that they benefit both you and your client.
Have you thought about who will be running these appointments? The agent? A licensed team member? Either or?
Regardless of who is conducting the meetings, they need to know how to run the meeting effectively.
If multiple people are conducting review meetings, you’ll need to make sure the meetings are all following the same outline/process to maintain consistency.
Whatever you do, don’t just wing it - your clients will be able to tell if you’re not prepared and will be much less likely to come back for a review if they don’t find value in their time spent.
That being said, just like anything else, the best teacher is experience.
You’ll learn and probably make adjustments as you go - but make sure you and your staff members have common goals and a solid foundation to build upon.
Don’t feel bad if you don’t know how to run these meetings, you're not alone!
There are plenty of resources out there for you to use to learn and practice.
Check out this blog post for a step-by-step guide to running insurance review appointments:
12 Steps for Running an Effective Customer Insurance Review Meeting
If you’d like more in-depth training on implementing your customer insurance review program, sign up for our FREE AgencyThrive Program.
The AgencyThrive program is also a great tool you can use to train your licensed staff members so they understand the ins and outs of customer insurance reviews.
If you’re not sure about training your staff members yet, take a look at this article: The Monetary Benefits of Training Your Agency Staff Members to Conduct Customer Insurance Reviews
What are some other logistical details that you’ve run into in your experience holding annual insurance reviews? Let us know in the comments below!