Best CRM for Insurance Agents: A Detailed Guide

Customer relationship management might seem like an idea mooted in the early 1990s,  but it has been around for many decades. Nearly every strategic business owner uniquely kept a record of customers, and it's no surprise that Rolodex was the precursor to modern-day CRM technologies. 

CRM is a collection of tools and strategies that foster lasting and beneficial relationships between businesses and customers. Today, different functions have been bundled into CRM systems, providing powerful features to manage the entire customer journey, improve team productivity, and enhance your communications. InsurGird's quote engine, for example, reduces your administrative costs and improves lead generation and conversion.

Benefits of CRM Software for Insurance Agents

Like every other business, the cost of bringing in a new customer is always greater than that of retaining existing ones. CRM software expands your retention strategies and improves lead generation, customer service, claims processing, and policy renewals. CRM offers the following additional benefits:

Time Savings

The CRM is a perfect place to sharpen your time management skills. Tracking customer interactions ensures shorter turnaround times for support issues, and some platforms also include email and messaging templates, so you won't have to draft everything from scratch. They also automate the data import and storage functions so you can focus on more profitable tasks.

Data Integrity

Insurance customers and prospects may come from multiple touchpoints, like social media referrals, personal selling channels, and customer service desks. CRM provides a unified storage and reference point for all this information so that all players within the business have access to accurate data. Achieving data integrity would be nearly impossible if all teams were responsible for collecting and storing customer information. Businesses using CRM systems for customer information storage find it easier to comply with data privacy rules and regulations.

Data analysis

Being able to store, track, and analyze massive volumes of customer data improves the risk scoring process so you can offer fair premiums to your customers. Data analysis and interpretation tools also improve decision-making around revenue growth opportunities, claims ratio management, and return on business investment.

Improved Communications

Great CRM systems align your communication strategies across all channels. Increased integrations have allowed CRM systems to connect to your social media channels, mail servers, and VoIP telephone systems to provide uniform messaging to all your customers.

Client Communications History

Knowing your previous interactions with a customer builds familiarity and lowers the frustrations they might have faced trying to re-introduce themselves. You can pick up from where you left off in the previous conversation, and it's good for making follow-ups for settled claims or resolved issues. It might also provide a perfect opportunity to upsell or cross-sell a new product.

CRM features for the insurance industry

CRM enables insurance companies and independent brokers to grow their business by magnifying their efforts when prospecting and nurturing leads. It also allows them to manage existing policies, track new deals, set new goals, and schedule client interactions. CRMs are expected to provide all-in-one support for the following underwriting activities:

Lead tracking

Lead tracking follows customer interactions throughout the sales process. It promotes organization and keeps you focused on your goals, tailoring your strategies to increase conversions at every stage. It's hard to be consistent when dealing with multiple customers, but CRM is always there to provide real-time data capturing, storage, and reporting.

Policy Management

Insurance policy management encompasses all the critical operations of an insurance firm, like:

• Risk scoring
• Quotations
• Proposal generation
• Policy issuance and renewals
• Claims processing
• Profitability reports

CRM automates these tasks, giving you the freedom to increase your lead generation efforts. 

Policy Sales data analysis

Without a full understanding of the risks that may impact your company, making decisions is difficult. Data analytics provides deeper insights into consumer attitudes and preferences, allowing you to review past performances and make accurate future predictions. CRM tools come with user-friendly analytics tools with clear dashboards sharing a single view of your entire insurance business. 

Workflow automation

Insurance workflow automation cuts the amount of time spent on routine tasks and reduces operational costs. Examples of the process you can automate with CRM include:

• Sales process workflows (lead generation, quotations, onboarding, and customer applications)
• Claims management
• Risk scoring and new product development
• Policy review
• Compliance management
• Customer complaints management

Claims management

Efficient claims management is the backbone of a high-performing underwriting business. Among the insurance broker's principal roles is to improve profitability. And they can only achieve this by minimizing the frequency, impact, and cost of claims to ensure business continuity. CRM software provides an accurate and timely prediction of future risks to mitigate your losses in today's complex business environment. 

Email Marketing

Email marketing establishes contact with current and prospective clients to raise awareness about your products and share important updates on their subscriptions. It is part of a holistic digital marketing strategy for building new business and nurturing relationships with existing clients. It's easy to implement email marketing with CRM software because you can rely on its customer database and built-in reporting tools.

Automated Distribution of Leads

Lead distribution CRM automatically assigns prospects to the best-fit agents based on metrics like:

• Location
• Agent performance
• Preferred language
• Current workloads

Qualified leads can be transferred to the onboarding teams, and those who drop along the pipeline can be reassigned to a sales agent. Lead distribution increases agent performance and reduces customer churn along the sales pipeline.

Communication Prioritization

Winning in customer communications requires consistent messaging across all the channels. However, it is hard to remain consistent when faced with evolving customer needs,  increased paperwork, and personalized instant messaging apps and social platforms. CRM allows unified multi-channel customer engagements, allowing agents to prioritize platforms that personalize interactions and improve response times.

Field Sales Enablement

CRM accelerates revenue generation through your field sales agents in the following ways:

• It allows them to reach more prospects using multiple channels.
• Automated quotations and draft policies improve turnaround times and increase conversion rates.
• Built-in lead indicators offer better visibility into the buying cycle, allowing the agents to be more strategic in their approach.
• Goal settings and KPI indicators can be used to evaluate and motivate the frontline sales agents.
• Scheduling tools and alerts keep them more organized and on top of their work.

Quote engine

A quote engine is an automated tool that allows clients to run side-by-side comparisons of insurance quotes from multiple carriers. Insurance brokers can use the quote engine to provide competitive rates and increase enrollments. 

Best CRMs for Insurance Agents

Insurance CRM has to be different from standard CRMs because the underwriting business model is unique from other businesses. And because everyone at your agency has a relationship with the customer, the software is crucial for running your sales, support, claims processing, and policy management functions.

Best Enterprise Insurance CRM systems

Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Microsoft's all-in-one enterprise CRM integrates seamlessly with their Office 365 applications like Outlook, Teams, and Microsoft Word. It complements agency work with customizable tools to support your sales, marketing, and customer service functions. Besides automating your services, the cloud-based software offers API integrations to third-party applications.

Pros

• Highly intuitive interface
• Easy integration with Microsoft Office applications
• Full-featured reports thanks to powerful analytics
• Excellent software support

Cons

• The full suite of solutions comes with a hefty price tag.

HubSpot

HubSpot offers a customizable CRM platform suitable for B2B and B2C insurance agencies. Agency managers can analyze email marketing campaign conversion and track lead conversion across various platforms, using inbound and outbound communications, lead management, and contact management. 

Pros

• Best free features in the CRM market
• Customizable and scalable features
• Easy to use
• Great customer support

Cons

• The full-featured plan is pricey for small businesses.

SAP Customer Experience

SAP Customer Experience provides a complete package of features tailored for large brokerage firms and agencies. It has many integration options, including e-commerce features that allow the direct selling of insurance products to consumers. A lot more features are easily usable out-of-the-box, but there is ample customization room for the insurance business. 

Pros

• Best suited for medium-sized to large businesses
• Synchronizes with  the SAP enterprise application for unified data management
• Extensive tools for third-party integration and customization
• Timely customer support and security patching when required

Cons

• Personalization can be complex and requires technical expertise.
• It is an expensive system for small businesses.