Take Your Customer’s Journey
Many of us know what it’s like to have a favorite t-shirt. Maybe the fabric is extra-soft, or the color complements your eyes, or it reminds you of your team winning the championship. Whatever the reason, it’s comfortable, so you wear it a lot. And then one day, you look at it and suddenly realize it’s faded and full of holes.
Sometimes we don’t see what’s right in front of us because it’s too familiar. This is why it’s helpful to look at your insurance agency and your sales practices from a customer’s perspective.
Try to imagine you’re approaching your agency to buy insurance for the first time and take the same journey your customers take. Evaluate your materials and processes through their eyes, focusing on a different aspect from start-to-finish, including things like:
Design
What does your look say about your agency? Is your logo bold and memorable or something you quickly put together using clip art when you first started out? Is your website more than five years old? It might look dated or be hard to access on a mobile device.
Visuals help to tell your story, giving clues into the type of agency you run. If you want to appeal to monied sophisticates, muted shades and understated elegance may be the right choice. If your goal is to attract young families, including a stock photo of a smiling family on your website homepage could be effective.
Ideally, your online presence will harmonize with all of your printed materials—business cards, flyers, brochures, policy folders, etc. This uniformity will send a message of consistency that is especially reassuring in a business such as insurance.
Knowledge
Another area where you want to be consistent is knowledgeability. You want correct, accessible information that is delivered in an easy-to-understand way. This means periodically auditing the information on your website and written materials and providing great training and mentoring so your staff members really know their stuff and how to communicate it.
This may play out in different ways depending on someone’s job duties. For instance, the knowledge that the person who answers your phones needs may include constantly updated staff contact information as well as the ability to troubleshoot tech questions like how to resize photos for a claim or upload documents to an insurer’s website. An insurance agent, on the other hand, should probably focus more on being fully versed in the products you sell, including details like policy exclusions, rebuild costs and things like that.
Customer Service
Customer service is a third lens that you can look through when evaluating your customer’s journey. Start with the initial contact. Is it friendly? Is it timely? Wait time can significantly affect how a person feels about an interaction, even if the agent they eventually spoke to was pleasant.
Then move on to other parts of their experience. Good customer service is about much more than being nice on the phone. Are you and your agents patient and thorough when answering questions? Are you empathetic when a client suffers an insured loss? Are you reliable about tracking down details and following up with information?
Listen in on other agents if you can and write down what they did well and what they could improve. Ask someone to do the same for you. Compare notes and have a brief discussion about what is right for your agency and whether you need to make more widespread changes or institute particular scripting or methods of handling specific queries.
Taking the same journey as your customers will help keep you self-aware and able to continually improve. Improvement then leads to growth—as a person, as an insurance agent, and as a business that depends on acquiring new customers to thrive.
Ready for some new prospects? Hometown Quotes has fresh leads for insurance agents all around the country. Give us a call at 800.820.8921 to learn more.
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