Insurance consumers spend 70% of their entire shopping "journey" in an online environment and expect real-time responses. Thus, independent agents must reboot their thinking from the customer's—not the industry's—perspective.
Marty Agather and Michael Rabinowitz from TrustedChoice.com were on hand at the March 2017 ACT Meeting to review how customers shop. They also sounded an alarm that agents must be very careful with how they manage telephone calls from interested buyers.
Agather outlined these steps in the customer journey:
- DISCOVER—where agencies need to create awareness.
- EVALUATE—agencies should generate favorable consideration.
- BUY—agencies should make it easy to buy, demonstrating the experience it will deliver. "This is where the consumer becomes a high-propensity buyer, not just a learner, and you're narrowing the field of choices down," he said. "They're looking for testimonials, and agents must offer them."
- EXPERIENCE—agencies should establish a bond and deliver noticeable value.
- RENEW OR LEAVE—agencies should reinforce affiliation through proactive engagement.
- ADVOCATE—agencies should leverage the fan base they've established.
TrustedChoice.com sends leads to participating agents, and they prefer they're dealt with in real time, Agather said. Many of these prospects first contact the agency via telephone call, and the results aren't pretty, he noted. A quarter to a third of "calls that agents get sent from us are never listened to or never left a message," he said.
"People have lost their patience. If you can't help them now, they're gone, and you'll never get a second chance. Phone trees don't work. You need a live operator." Many of the calls come in after hours; thus, TrustedChoice.com will be routing more inquiries to agencies that are open after 5 p.m. and on weekends.
Leads are also sent via email from TrustedChoice.com. Agather recommended that agencies use a "round-robin approach," where if someone responsible for inbound inquiries isn't available someone else can provide service immediately. And agencies should be more cognizant that prospect emails could be sitting in a spam folder; conversely, responses from agency staff can go to spam on the prospect side.
To provide additional insight, Agather shared a series of four recordings, highlighting—or perhaps more accurately lowlighting—how several anonymous agencies are not meeting customer needs and expectations: excessive phone tree prompts with no eventual in-person assistance, recorded greetings stating the caller is engaging outside of normal business hours and to call back, having no staff available and suggesting callers leave a message, and providing a recorded greeting stating the agency cannot take their call as they are experiencing higher than normal call volume.
"Every minute you can't service that customer is another minute that someone else will," Agather warned.
FROM THE EDITOR: The PowerPoint from this ACT Meeting presentation is available here.