Nothing impacts your business’s success more than the strength of your customer relationships. When you establish your agency as a proactive adviser with the highest-quality customer service, you can grow both retention and sales to expand your business at every level. That’s because happy customers who feel a connection to your company are more likely to renew, more likely to use your agency when they need new products, and more likely to become brand advocates, recommending your agency to friends and family.

Challenges to Maintaining Customer Relationships

Fostering strong customer relationships means going the extra mile to maintain constant contact with insureds. Whether it’s sending a quote to a prospect, sending a reminder about renewals, replying to a change request, or just sending birthday wishes, your agency needs to constantly reach out and respond to customers. Without this consistent communication and availability, even loyal customers can get frustrated or feel unheard. Despite the importance of customer relationship management, it can become a challenge for agencies to remain constantly available to clients while also getting other critical tasks done – let’s examine some solutions to this problem.

Building Customer Relationships

How can your agency focus on building strong customer relationships and also have time for everything else? The solution is to have software that both saves time and lets agents reach out and respond to insureds frequently and quickly to create a satisfying customer experience. These tech solutions should also give clients choice in how to communicate with agencies, including via text message, online or through email.

Increasing Customer Loyalty

Let’s review some of the software that will help strengthen your customer relationships and save your agency time:

24/7 Customer Support

Sometimes, all clients want is access to their personal documents like ID cards and policies and other customer data in real time. An online portal where insureds can download docs 24/7/365 is the perfect way to foster positive relationships with insureds, making them feel like they’re getting quality service while reducing time spent responding to requests. With software that gives clients access to their personal information and the ability to ask for policy changes online from any device, your customers get the convenient, immediate service responses they want from any location. Best of all, by reducing in-person contact with insureds and moving them online, your agents are free to focus on more revenue-generating tasks without sacrificing client satisfaction.

Email Marketing Software

Tech that helps you draft and send personalized emails at the right moment to a target audience lets you create a quality customer experience for every insured. When clients receive birthday wishes or timely reminders, they feel more connected to your agency and are more likely to renew, respond positively to upselling, and recommend your business to friends and family. Insurtech that delivers that personal touch for increased customer satisfaction also saves your agents time as they no longer have to remember those important dates to send emails on them – a win-win for everyone. The same software that lets you send these personalized emails also enables you to run reports on marketing campaigns to see metrics that help you understand which messages most resonate with clients.

Retention Software

Retention software is another solution that can support customer needs and your agency at the same time. EZLynx® Retention Center® is currently the only patented retention software on the market with the full capabilities you need to maximize renewals. Using this solution, you can touch every single renewal and prioritize at-risk clients so that you can focus on them. Retention Center also increases customer retention rates by letting you send automated messages to lower-risk renewals so that your entire customer base feels taken care of. You can even use this solution to generate pricing changes between clients’ current and potential future policies, eliminating the effort and hours spent comparing dec pages and giving insureds a clear view into policy changes.

Automation Software

Automation can enhance almost every aspect of maintaining customer relationships. Automation software allows you to preset email send dates for customer outreach and renewal, eliminating the need to track manually. It can also ensure that you remember to review and follow up on policy changes so that customers always have the right information. When you implement automation insurtech across your business, your customer outreach becomes easier to track and manage and can even increase in frequency, while your support team has more time in the day to focus on other important tasks.

Text Messaging

Modern customers expect to have a variety of options when it comes to communicating with their insurance agencies. This means your business needs to offer more than just email and over-the-phone responses to maintain customer engagement – in addition to online access, clients often prefer to communicate via text message. It’s important to have the ability to give all insureds relevant policy information via text.

In addition to fostering good customer relationships, making text message available to customers and prospects also has enormous benefits for your business. Text messages have a 97% open rate, meaning clients are much more likely to see and respond to this method of communication. Text messaging also minimizes E&O claims, making it a safe and fast way to communicate with insureds.

Tech that Strengthens Customer Loyalty

Your agency’s growth and profits rely on building and maintaining strong customer relations. When your clients know that your agency is available to them round the clock and can contact you through text, online, or via the touchpoints they’re most comfortable with, insureds are more likely to have an emotional connection to your agency that fosters brand loyalty and word-of-mouth referrals.

Updating clients when it’s time for renewals and reaching out to them on special occasions like birthdays also reassures them that you have their back and that they’re top of mind. To maintain an excellent level of client service and communication without taking time away from other areas of your business, you’ll need to have the right software in place – insurtech that facilitates retention, email communication, text messaging and 24/7 access as well as software that makes it possible to automate many of your communication processes to reach more customers.

The advantages of implementing this new tech go beyond its ability to boost client communication by saving your agents time and effort across the board so that they can focus on more revenue generation even as you’re your customer relationships continue to strengthen.