In the insurance world, customer retention is key. In most cases, retention efforts take precedence over acquisition over new customers because retention rates for insurance are lower than most other industries. According to the Independent Insurance Agents of Dallas, it costs seven to nine times more for an insurance agency to attract a new customer than to retain one, among the highest customer acquisition costs of any industry.
This leaves agencies contending with new strategies to keep clients on board and from seeking their insurance needs elsewhere. There are numerous factors that can go into a client’s decision to drop their current agent, the usual suspect being unhappy with their rates. However, clients are also soured on agents due to poor communication and feeling undervalued.
Most of the time, agents want to spend more time communicating with clients, but there’s just too much work on their plates. It’s easy to get caught up in new projects, meanwhile, other clients get frustrated from the lack of communication, or use the period of no contact to look at other options. Important dates get forgotten, which leads to missing unique opportunities to sell new policies or upgrade current ones. Renewal dates sneak up on you, leaving you scrambling to gather materials and ill-prepared to keep clients on board for another year.
Automation goes a long way toward improving communication with clients. Document management software can be like having a second brain that remembers important dates and automatically prepares the required material for you, so you’re prepared to diligently chat with your clients about their coverage.
Be Ready with Governance and Workflow
Document management software is more than a storage solution for your digital files, it’s a means to introduce a number of automation methods to your everyday work to make certain tasks more efficient. Governance is essentially a tool that allows you to attach a future date to a document with an action that will take place on that date.
Governance can be used for simple processes like retention, allowing you to set when certain documents are purged from the system once you’ve retained them for long enough. It can also be used to create notifications for yourself concerning that document.
Workflow is another form of automation that allows you to set up elaborate rules and action trees for the system to follow. You can create simple approval workflows that move documents to different locations depending on if designated users approve or reject the file. Other workflows allow other actions to be automatically carried out when certain conditions are met.
Workflows are perfect for automating the processing of claims and other materials through the business. The faster you can get clients’ claims through to providers, the faster they get reimbursed, and the happier they’ll be.
However, you can also set up workflows to make your retention efforts streamlined. Governance can be used to start workflows after a certain amount of time. For example, prepare the required documents for renewal in a folder, attach a governance rule to begin a workflow before the client’s renewal date arrives. The workflow will do the work of seeking approvals and getting the proper paperwork to everybody, so you’re more than prepared to talk to the client about renewal.
Rubex by eFileCabinet is a document management system that has an intuitive interface for making workflows and setting governance for all your essential insurance documents. To see it in action, click here to schedule a free, personalized demo.
