Preparing Your Agency: Laying The Groundwork for an Effective Annual Insurance Review Program

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 buy more insurance.

Following the tips in this post will help lay the groundwork for your agency’s successful annual insurance review program - we'll follow up with a blog post about preparing your customers next week!

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 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 a chance to understand their coverage more thoroughly.

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-selling 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 over a specified period of time

• Meet with X number of customers each month/week

• Receive X number of referrals each month

• Ask for referrals at least once during each appointment

Your measurable goals - like the number of appointments, retention rate, referrals received - should reflect your current book of business.

The most successful insurance agencies invite every customer for a review annually.

How many people will you need to invite each month to ensure you get through your book of business in the year?

Since we’ve been setting appointments for insurance agents for over 18 years, we’ve learned a lot and have 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 specifically for your agency.

The plan will show you exactly how many…

• Appointments you should set each month

• Customers to contact 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 straightforward outline for your 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 hire a part-time caller, have your current staff do it, or outsource 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 processes in place.

Each agency is unique - some agencies find great success setting their own appointments, while others prefer an outside vendor.

Obviously, we prefer you to use Engagex to set these appointments (we are a business, after all), and it's typically more cost-effective. Still, as I said before, setting appointments in-house is doable if you’re willing to put in the extra effort.

Some customers 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 set X number of appointments and simply hope for a good outcome.

You need to know how to run these meetings effectively to benefit both you and your client.

Have you thought about who will be running these appointments? The agent? A licensed team member or office manager? Either or?

Regardless of who is conducting the meetings, they must know how to run them effectively.

If multiple people are conducting review meetings, you’ll need to ensure the meetings follow 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 clear, shared 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 an excellent 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

Next week, we'll dive into how you can prepare your customers for these meetings - stay tuned!