Your Insurance Agency's "Community" Reputation

I have long encouraged agents to take control of their online reputation. Monitoring feedback left by others at various online rating and search services is a must. Encouraging positive feedback is even better.

I recently concluded a purchase on eBay (where buyers and sellers are sometimes referred to as the 'EBay community) and received an email soliciting not just my direct feedback, but also a request to rate my experience via the eBay seller rating function. Here's the email (names omitted to protect the innocent:

Thank you for your purchase from Business Name Omitted.

We received note that your order has been delivered and would like to verify that you are satisfied with your purchase and our service.

Please reply to this email if there is anything that would keep you from giving us 5 stars on all ratings. We'll do what it takes to make it right.

If you are satisfied we would highly appreciate it if you would leave us positive feedback with 5 stars on all ratings on eBay. Please use this link: Direct Link to eBay Rating for Seller Omitted.

We have already added positive feedback to your ebay profile. Your feedback can be viewed at:
Direct Link to my eBay Profile and Rating Omitted.

If you have any questions you can either reply to this email or call us at Phone Number Omitted.

Thank you for your business,
Business Name Omitted

Taking a cue from this approach and using a version of this email after every agency sale, renewal, or claim will deliver multiple benefits. First, you will be systematically probing to be sure your customers are happy and will be building stronger relationships (aka, less price sensitivity, more referrals). Second, you will far outstrip your competition in the number positive reviews your agency has at Google Maps (local search), Yahoo Local, Yelp, etc. All you have to do is insert the direct link for rating at those services into your standard email, similar to the example above.

The Insurance Annual Review Challange

I  was recently asked if I had any statistics about insurance agencies who performed annual client reviews.  I do (somewhere), but lost interest when I couldn't turn up anything after ten minutes of folder foraging.  But I did run across some stats from which you can reasonably extrapolate the kind of results your insurance agency might get if you performed annual reviews.

• 83% consumers want an annual review – NAIC Survey
  
• 90% want all their insurance in one place – Progressive Survey
  
• 6.8 is the average number of insurance policies per household; most agencies average less than 2 (this includes life, health, disability, an agency should have an interest in these other products that are out there – 

Selling other insurance products, such as life insurance, can actually improve the retention rate of other products the agency sells. A 1998 report... showed that the retention rate of automobile policies improved when the customer purchased more than insurance from the agency.

The retention level improved from 61 percent to 83 percent in policy year five when a customer purchased three or four products from the same agency. The rate improves from 44 percent to 75 percent in year 10 and from 35 percent to 71 percent in year 15.

Yet, the percentage of American households who own multiple lines of insurance from the same agency remains small. Only 6.9 percent of all households have purchased p-c and life insurance products from the same agency, LIMRA reported in that study.  National Underwriter, 2003, Issue #2)

Of course, there are reviews and then there are reviews. The content and positioning of a review questionnaire should follow the objectives the agency has for the activity. I recall visiting a large agency service center a few years ago when they were sending out renewal questionnaires. At the time, the response rate was about 30% - respondents overwhelmingly asked to be re-quoted to see if the agency could get them a reduced premium.   I’m sure someone around there has a bad taste about that still.   There was a problem with the questions the agency used on the questionnaire.  Customers seemed to think there were one of two outcomes:  either the agency was going to sell them more stuff thereby increasing my costs, or they were going to make the agency re-quote my policy to reduce my costs. 

Effective review formats consist of questions to turn up potential gaps that may not be addressed in standard policies.  An online format can be sampled in an Annual Review Wizard from Confluency Solutions (request a review if you want to try it out).  The Wizard asks what has changed and puts the agent in a position to follow up with suggestions to adjust insurance protection for those changes. This format is focused on creating opportunities to discuss other products and capture more policy relationships – a follow up is necessary in a process like this, and an agency needs to know it has capacity for the activity that will be generated.  But a review can be an effective account development and retention tactic.  You just have to have a little faith in my extrapolation...or maybe you have some results of your own you wouldn't mind sharing?

Easy Updates to Your Insurance Agency Blog

An easy way to make sure you update your insurance agency blog is to use RSS feeds to have potential blog content and ideas pushed to you. You can riff on information provided for you, but be sure to put some kind of unique spin on it. What does the information mean to businesses and consumers in your market area? Could you expand on some key points?

If you don't know what an RSS feed is*, you owe it to yourself to check it out. RSS feeds can be quickly and easily set up to 'push' content from most news, blog (and other websites) to a RSS reader of your choice (Google Reader, My Yahoo!, etc.).

One feed you should definitely set up is to the Insurance Information Institute's blog. They post regularly, and often include statistics and study related information that can be effective in your agency blog.

By the way, you can set up an RSS feed to this blog, and if you take the plunge and set up an agency blog, you should definitely encourage others to set up feeds to your insurance agency...

RSS in Plain English*

Blogs in an Insurance Agency Ecosystem

Blogging remains a foreign concept to many insurance agents and many larger businesses as well: only 12% of Fortune 500 Companies are using blogs in their communication mix. But smaller companies have caught on to the business benefits of blogs. A recent estimate put the number of business related blogs at over 850,000. Unless your insurance agency has an active blog (or two), you are missing on an effective and virtually free way to get more customers, quality control information you provide to consumers,and increase website content and generate more site traffic (i.e., even more new customers).

One tool, one tactic, and a multiplicity of benefits. What are you waiting for? The trick is to find a way to take a concept unfamiliar to many insurance agents (blogging) and embed that concept in your agency practices in a way that quickly breeds familiarity.

Here is how a blog might fit into an agency ecosystem:

1. Blog set up with all producers and CSRs with ‘author’ permission (that is, everyone can post to the blog).
2. Your insurance agency web administrator monitors your blog weekly

Scenario:

• Customer calls or emails CSR or producer with a question.
• CSR or producer determines if question is account or customer specific, or applicable to a broad cross section of customers or prospects.
• If the question is account specific, the CSR or producer can answer the question via email or on the phone.
• If the question and answer have broader applicability, the CSR or producer post the Q and A to the agency blog, then email the blog post linkto the customer.
• Agency website admin reviews blog posts weekly; content is edited for accuracy, etc. Some content, with small modifications, can be moved to the agency website as an FAQ or article.

In the above scenario, the blog posts substitute for email content, and they present little extra effort. Responsibility for blog content is distributed across all staff vs. becoming a burden for one person; and by extension, responsibility for website content refresh is also shared. The blog would be a resource first for individual customers and insurance agency staff, and later, a resource for a wider audience, either as blog posts or edited posts migrated to agency website content.

Someone in the agency will have to review content for quality periodically; this is probably not being done now (with emails and phone conversations), and would constitute an additional task. But quality reviews are a good practice for a number of reasons. Using a blog as outlined above makes quality control possible in a way that would be far more difficult to manage with emails and phone conversations alone.

I can see some objections to inserting a blog into daily communications, but all objections will basically boil down to this consideration: Blogs and other Web 2.0 tools are routinely used by other businesses, and growing number of consumers - especially Generation Y. Is your agency willing to adapt to new communication tools to improve agency service and acquire new customers, or are you satisfied with the status quo? If capturing new customers and improving the quantity and quality your agency can deliver for basically no cost are objectives for your agency, then there is really no valid objection to blogging.

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Flesh and Blood and Circuits Revisited

I saw a press release yesterday about Allstate providing mental/visual acuity exercises via software from www.positscience.com. It is geared toward helping older drivers process more visual info – something that deteriorates with age. Interesting, proactive, and forward thinking. In the grand scheme of my script/consultation program, this is a product an agent might suggest, and a conversation to be had when a customer reaches 50 or 60. That’s an age when your driving skills haven’t deteriorated much, but you are completely sober about the reality and inevitability of the decline. Waiting until a customer hits 70 is too late; by then they are in denial. Or maybe you have the conversation with customers who are in their 30’s about their parents.

(note: at the time of the press release, I could not find anything on the allstate website about the service. oops!)

Connecting the Dots: Insurance Agency Service and Technology

I was doing some light research while drafting copy for target market website landing pages, and once again, allowed the internet to pull me into a digressive side alley. So of course I have to drag you all in with me.

The cover article in a periodical widely read by agents and companies, Rough Notes caught my eye. The September, 2008 issue features an agency that is able to provide high levels of service thanks to technology: Technology Backs High-Service Approach at 7-Person Agency.

What is instructive about the article is that all the ‘technology’ referenced in the piece is internally focused: insurance company-to-agency via download and real time rating, internal efficiencies gained going paperless (that can mean several different things, but that is a post for another day). There are a handful of platitudes about ‘service’ in article: ‘customer-focused’, ‘service “through the internet'; ‘Technology has allowed us to communicate with the younger generation…through email’; ‘We’re able to meet with clients more frequently, assist with claims, and provide them with quotes from other companies if that’s what they want’. These are the same kind of general, ‘service’ claims agents have been making since eight seconds before the advent of dust.

My point is not to cast doubt on the featured agency's ability to deliver these service generalities better than other agencies. The point is that too often we assume internally focused technology and efficiencies result in better service. There is an old and well validated axiom: work expands to fill the time available. If we create time through efficiencies, but do not explicitly fill that time with measurable, customer focused activities, the void is often back filled with more internal work.

What caught my eye about the article's title was the juxtaposition of the words 'technology' and 'high-service'. My mind leapt to the assumption that some kind of customer facing technology was at work in the featured agency. That I made the assumption is my problem, but it does raise another point. Technology for pushing data around the agency, or to and from the company, is not technology that consumers care about. Too often I still see agency websites touting a 'state of the art computer system' when all there is to brag about is an agency management system and some kind of comparative rater. That will engender a great big, consumer yawn every time. If a consumer is to care about technology, direct benefits need to be described - that is, here is how you will save time, or here is why your protection will be better. Indirect benefits - we're more efficient so we might be able to spend more time with you - just don't resonate.

There is nothing to suggest that the featured agency is using technology to systematically develop their customers and differentiate their agency. It’s all about saving time, and putting that time savings to work in an ad-hoc way will result in'higher-service' that is inconsistent at best.

I don’t mean to suggest that efficiency is not important; it is a key to profitability and sanity. But having more time is not the same as providing value-added service (which the Rough Notes cover suggests the article is about). That is a point we felt was being missed too often when we conceived Confluency Solutions four years ago, and the point is still being missed, I'm afraid.