Selling insurance comes with its unique challenges, but, at its core, it follows the same process as essentially any other type of sales. Potential customers identify a need, search for information, evaluate their options, and make a purchase decision. The more contacts your agency can make with a lead throughout that process, the more data you can capture, and the more tailored a solution you can offer, the higher the chances of a successful sale. Insurance CRMs – like all CRMs – focus heavily on automating and improving lead collection and management to help agencies like yours not only capture that key customer data, but turn it into a useful competitive advantage. 

 

However, sales tools aren’t the only thing a good insurance CRM has to offer. Your CRM certainly enables your agents to get a head start on the sales process, forge stronger relationships earlier, understand customer needs better, close deals faster, and provide better post-sale service. But it can also help improve compliance, identify gaps in your clients’ policies, improve your whole company’s workflow efficiency, and much more. The following is an overview of just some of those additional capabilities you should be looking for when shopping for a new insurance CRM. 

 

Easier Compliance Monitoring

 

The insurance industry is a regulatory minefield, and carefully and consistently monitoring operations to ensure compliance is a key factor in long-term success. Insurance CRM platforms centralize communications and policyholder data in a secure environment, offering the most seamless compliance monitoring possible. Each and every piece of communication, whether it’s an email between employees, an inbound call from a client, or anything else, can be handled through the CRM and automatically recorded for posterity. 

 

By centralizing all communications and automatically logging all lead and client communications, agencies can ensure there is an unbroken record of operations that can be quickly and easily searched and sorted. In the case of CRMDialer and its built-in call center, features like listen-in also allow HR or team managers to spot-check agents and staff in real-time on the phone, helping ensure potential problems are caught and corrected as early as possible. When selecting a new insurance CRM, the more automated and widespread the communication integration and logging, the better. 

 

Easy Policy Management

 

Insurance policies are living documents that adapt and evolve as client needs change, especially when insuring businesses that constantly grow over time. A good insurance CRM should make it easier than ever for agents to stay on top of policy changes or potential new upsell opportunities, thanks to the extreme ease of referencing the totality of a client’s history through their lead account. Because the system logs all of a client’s communication and documents to their lead account, agents can refresh their knowledge of their policyholders in a matter of minutes. That helps agents ensure clients always have the insurance coverage they need – a key step in ensuring happy, long-term relationships where everyone walks away happy, especially should claims eventually arise. 

 

Improved Workflow Efficiency

 

Time is money in all businesses, and anything that can cut down on the time it takes to perform the most common daily tasks will help your agents generate more business. A good insurance CRM is designed specifically to improve efficiency by minimizing the number of platforms agents have to juggle and jump between, instead allowing them to handle most (or potentially all) of their daily tasks through a single point of control. From lead management to email communication to meeting scheduling to document management to ongoing customer service and beyond, a good CRM enables agents to do it all faster and easier by bringing everything into one place. 

 

Any CRM you choose should offer the maximum value across all areas of your operations, serving everyone from the CEO to the front desk. In many ways, that comes purely down to feature richness, meaning the more features an insurance CRM can offer, the more likely it is to provide value at all levels of your organization. As an example, CRMDialer includes a built-in power dialer. It’s a rare feature for a CRM to include, but one that enables every single member of your team to bring their daily calling into the system, speeding it up and removing friction from one of the most common tasks they perform. 

 

Unlimited Users and Storage

 

One major drawback of many insurance CRMs is that they work on a per-user pricing model. That might seem attractive for the smallest agencies or ones just starting out, but adopting a per-user CRM means that once your agency starts to grow, you’re more likely to feel locked into a bill that grows right alongside you – often much faster. The alternative is to look for an insurance CRM that offers unlimited users and unlimited storage. Doing so ensures that as your agency succeeds and your roster of policyholders expands, your technology costs won’t act as resistance to your growth. 

 

Exceptional Usability

 

When selecting a new insurance CRM, the most important thing is to remember that the system exists to enable and empower your staff to do their jobs more effectively and with less friction. Features are important, but at the end of the day, if your team isn’t using them, they’re moot. That makes it extremely important to select a system that is easy to use and, equally importantly, easy to learn for even your most technophobic old-school agents. The only way to get a good sense of usability prior to purchase is with a thorough demonstration from any vendors you’re considering. Luckily, all CRM providers will happily walk you through their products. When watching demos, the key question to ask yourself is a simple one: “would I use this?” If you perceive friction in the demo from a person trained to know the system inside and out, there’s a good chance your team will perceive it too, which could be a real hindrance to successful adoption. 

 

CRMDialer is a leading CRM designed specifically to be easy to adopt, easy to use, and exceptionally beneficial across all levels of a sales organization. It includes a full suite of the advanced lead collection and management tools that make CRMs so beneficial to sales, as well as a full slate of other features centralizing everything from marketing to billing and payments to reporting to communications and more. It even includes a full-featured power dialer and an easy-to-use mobile app, allowing your agents to handle their work on-the-fly from anywhere. 

 

For a firsthand look at everything CRMDialer can do for your organization, reach out to a member of the team to schedule a guided demonstration, or start your no-commitment free trial today!