Six Tips for Retaining Insurance Clients

Insurance carriers and independent agents spend so much time and attention on acquiring new clients. However, just as much attention — if not more — should be paid to retaining current clients.  Acquiring new clients has become increasingly expensive in recent years, as competition has exploded in the market. For instance, a recent study revealed that it costs anywhere from seven to nine times as much to acquire a new insurance client than it does to retain one.   This makes retaining clients one of the most cost-effective ways to grow your business. Below are six tips for retaining insurance clients. 

Create an Extensive Onboarding Process

The onboarding process is the first experience your clients will get with you after signing a contract. This makes it one of the most important times in your relationship.  By prioritizing this part of the relationship, you’ll be investing in future growth prospects with your clients. It’s a great opportunity to educate your clients on all the products you offer, and not necessarily just the ones they have purchased.  You can also start to build trust during the onboarding process, which leads to your clients coming back to you if they have future insurance needs.

Constantly Communicate

If you want to retain clients, you need to always stay in touch with them. Clients don’t want to feel like you sold them a product and then disappeared. They want to feel as if you’re always looking out for their best interests.  Constantly communicating in a positive way can help your clients feel appreciated, which is a key factor in retention. Make sure that you are celebrating their special occasions, including their birthdays and any other special milestones that you know about.  While it’s vital to reach out around policy renewal time, it shouldn’t be the only time that you communicate with your current clients.

Remove the Friction

There are many potential pain points that your clients will face. Unfortunately, those pain points might be different for every one of your clients.  By removing all the friction that exists that prevents your clients from doing what they need to do in an efficient and pain-free way, you’ll be ensuring that they have a great customer experience.  The only way that you’ll be able to do this effectively, though, is by understanding the typical journey and experience of your customers.   Create a customer journey map so you can see how a customer gets from Point A to Point Z in every way that they would interact with you, your company and the products they purchase. Create individual customer personas, too, so that you can see how the journey might differ for the many types of customers you have.  When you have this information and data in hand, you’ll be better prepared to improve the process from start to finish.

Consistently Gather Feedback

Customer feedback is one of the most valuable resources you have as an independent insurance agent. If you aren’t able to accurately identify the areas where you might be falling short, where you’re excelling and what new things you could offer, it will be challenging to retain insurance clients for the long-term.  Many companies today integrate what are known as VoC, or voice of customer, programs. Gartner research reports that companies that use these programs end up spending 25% less to retain customers than companies that don’t.  These are formal programs for gathering and then applying feedback from customers across all departments. Digital tools make it very simple to reach out to customers in multiple ways to gather feedback, then bring it all together in one place so you can properly analyze it.  By implementing changes and adjustments based on this feedback, you’ll be fine-tuning your operation based on how your customers feel.

Cross-Sell

You can create immense value for you and your insurance clients by cross-selling and up-selling. The more products a client buys from you, the more likely they are to remain with your agency for the long-term.  From your perspective, cross-selling and up-selling is a very cost-effective way to generate more revenue. It involves marketing other policies that you have to clients who are already in your database.  A great way to do this is to pay attention to your clients’ changing needs. If you know that one of your auto insurance clients are buying a new house, for instance, you can up-sell home insurance to them.   Form your clients’ perspective, cross-selling actually benefits them, too. They can gain significant discounts and savings by purchasing more than one policy from you. Plus, they can consolidate bills by purchasing multiple products from one agent.

Offer Customizable Policies

You can stand out from other insurance agents by offering customizable policies. By tailoring insurance policies to each individual client, you’ll be gaining trust and respect from your clients right from the beginning of your relationship.  They’ll feel heard and appreciated when you only sell them what they need, and/or cater an insurance policy to whatever unique needs they might have. In doing this, you’ll be developing clients who are more likely to remain loyal to you over the long-term. 

Discover the Good Life

At Good Life Insurance Associates, our experienced insurance sales associates are here to provide support and training for both new and experienced agents. To learn more about us, remember to explore our business support services. Or, to speak with a member of our team about your journey to becoming an independent agent, contact us today!