In the current marketplace, offering exceptional service is crucial to retaining clients and staying ahead of the competition. To provide service that can exceed customer expectations, insurance agencies need to go the extra mile with insurtech that includes the latest innovations like text messaging, chatbots, and online portals that allow access to documents anytime, day or night.

The benefits of good customer service software go far beyond boosting your brand with insureds. This insurtech can also increase efficiency by automating client-facing tasks and helping agencies leverage customer data insights for more sales. These days, having the right customer service insurtech is nonnegotiable for any independent agency that wants to thrive and grow.

What Is Customer Service Insurtech?

You know that customer service insurtech is essential to your success, but what is it exactly? Insurtech, or insurance technology, encompasses all the insurance software that helps you manage your agency and deliver better results to clients. From your management system to your rating engine, these are the systems you use throughout the complete insurance customer lifecycle and beyond. You need insurtech to run your agency smoothly overall and customer service insurtech to provide a quality experience for your clients that keeps them happy and renewals high.

Now that you understand more about customer service insurtech, let’s examine some of the software that can elevate both your customers’ experience and your agency’s overall performance.

Software That Provides the Best Customer Experience:

Chatbots

Give clients answers to their questions immediately and free your employees for more important tasks with a virtual assistant. Virtual assistants leverage machine learning and language processing to respond to basic client requests and create follow-up tasks for agents. The most effective virtual assistants can monitor your incoming text messages and respond to the customer requests they’re able to perform. This allows your customer service representatives to increase productivity by eliminating the need to respond to the routine service requests that the chatbot can handle.

Texting

Exceed customer expectations with convenient SMS and MMS messaging that’s integrated into your management system. Software that lets you respond to client text messages on your desktop enables you to meet customers where they are. A text messaging option also saves you time and effort as text messages are more likely to be seen and responded to, with 97% open rates.

Track & Manage Sales Task

Meet customer needs with dedicated software for customer relationship management (a CRM system) so that all the tools to manage the client lifecycle are on one easy-to-use platform. When you can manage marketing, sales and customer service on one integrated platform, your clients get the fast, accurate results they expect, and you can avoid wasting time switching between platforms or searching for documents and sifting through spreadsheets and systems. Having a CRM with all your client data in one place also allows you to easily access client data to identify potential sales opportunities.

Retention Software

Ensure every customer feels cared for with retention software that uses automation to touch on 100% of renewals. With retention software, you can use analytic risk models to identify at-risk policies and give those clients the extra attention they need. Automatically generated summaries of premium-bearing changes between an insured’s current policy and the renewal offer will help customers feel that you’re taking the time to make them feel comfortable with the decision to renew while saving you hours previously spent manually comparing Dec pages. The end result of dedicated retention software is an improved customer experience that increases customer satisfaction and maximizes renewals.

Customer portals

Offer a customer experience that includes service any time, day or night. With an online customer portal that gives insureds secure access to their policy documents and ID cards 24/7/365 and the ability to request changes and keep all data up to date, you can give clients the superior customer support they want. The same software will also increase agency productivity by minimizing time spent on general service requests.

Mobile Apps

Give insureds access to documents and the ability to request policy changes on any device, including their phones with insurtech that delivers secure mobile-optimized customer service. Having software that can go the extra mile with a streamlined client experience on any device will also save you time by reducing in-person servicing requests, freeing up your agents for more revenue-generating work.

Automation

Use automation to keep up with insureds via timely automated communication for events like birthdays and policy term changes that make every client feel top of mind. In addition to helping create loyal customers and boosting retention with targeted personalized messages, insurtech automation saves time and increases productivity by eliminating repetitive tasks from your workflow.

Digital Payments

Exceed customer expectations with an easy online payment experience similar to the ones clients are used to on popular e-commerce sites like Amazon. When your agency can offer online checkout pages from any device and the customer experience modern insureds expect, you get the multitude of benefits digital payments provide.

Agency benefits of using digital payments include:

• Shortening the payment processing time
• Speeding up deposits
• Automating accounts receivables to reduce back-office inefficiencies
• Opportunity to upsell related items via a branded checkout page
• Ability to standardize payments data into one place

Going Above and Beyond

In an era when clients expect businesses to provide exceptional customer service 24/7, having the right insurtech can mean the difference between gaining and retaining clients and losing out to the competition. That’s not all, though. The same insurtech that boosts customer loyalty to your agency also offers many benefits outside direct customer support. From increasing productivity with automated personalized messages and responses, to improving security via secure portals, to maximizing sales and renewals, customer service insurtech is software vital to any agency’s success.