Benefits of a Self Service Portal for Insurance Companies

here is research that says the average person will spend at least 43 days of their lives on hold with an automated customer service system.

While 43 days is a lot of time spent just sitting there listening to "how important your call is to the organization" over and over, it can certainly feel longer every time you cannot get your issue resolved because a representative took an hour and a half to come online.

A study conducted by Zendesk recently confirmed what most people who have ever been put on hold have known for a while: they would rather have a way to help themselves as opposed to waiting on a customer service agent.

The study shows that 67% of all the respondents preferred helping themselves through self-service portals.

Consider the following statistics:

• 90% of all consumers expect your organization to have a self-service portal  

• 60% of all consumers hold an organization in a better light if they have a self-service portal that is mobile responsive  

• 91% of consumers said they would gladly use an online knowledge base if it were available  

• 73% of consumers say that they would rather suffer the atrocities of washing a toilet than speak to a customer service agent

Forget about the number of people who would rather wash a toilet than speak to a customer service agent for a second.

Think of all the money implementing a self-service portal for your insurance company would save you.

According to a study conducted by Forrester unnecessary channel escalation service costs average $22 million a year.

You could be losing a good chunk on that when your online customer service fails, as it quite often does!

5 Benefits of the Salesforce Self-Service Portal for Insurance Companies

When dealing with companies that experience a higher than typical volume of customer/organization interaction such as insurance companies do, you simply have no choice but to find a way to streamline customer service.

Self-service portals and extensively informative FAQ pages are a wonderful way of doing so. Here are some benefits of having robust self-service portals for insurance companies:

1. Self-service portals will help you reduce customer service costs

Your mid-sized insurance company has almost half a million clients, if not more. These are people who will need assistance from the company from day to day.

Whether they are:

• Looking for answers

• Lodging claims

• Clarifying billing issues

Maybe they just want to find out more about the services you offer.

Either way, even if a tenth of these people makes phone calls to your company every day, the kind of manpower you will need to man those phones will result in astounding overheads.

Overheads that could very well be reduced if you had a self-service portal where at least 67% of these daily callers could go to when looking for solutions.

As your company grows, the more robust your self-service portal, the fewer tickets your customer service team will have to deal with every day. Meaning that your customer service bills do not necessarily have to grow with your company.

2. Self-service portals teach your customers valuable skills

A well-structured self-service portal will have comprehensive answers and solutions to a myriad of customer problems.

For the most part, the solutions given often go above and beyond thus answering even unasked questions (questions that are bound to be future problems).

When a client gets the right solution to their problem once, they are most likely going to follow the same path to solve any issues they may have in the future.

The research skills they utilize on your portal can be transferred to other aspects of your business or even other corporations that they deal with in their lives.

Although this doesn't necessarily translate into money for you, it does provide the client with some value, and they will, subconsciously, attach that value to your brand.

That, in turn, increases their level of trust in your brand and their chances of referring you to their friends. So it does indirectly translate to money for you.

3. Self-service portals help your customer service agents provide better care to your customers

When they have fewer calls to deal with every day, your customer service agents will have more time to attend to each of those customers who do not use the self-service portal (and there will be some who just won't use the portal no matter how robust).

By allotting more time and better care to each customer, your customer service agents will be more productive in the sense that they will create a better customer experience for each call they field.

That directly translates to a better-satisfied customer for your brand who may very well become a brand ambassador.

4. Self-service portals bring in more online traffic

We live in a digital world where big brands are always jostling for a chunk of the ever-fleeting online traffic that tends to translate into sales and brand awareness.

With the right kind of self-service portal; one that is highly informative and very useful to your clients, you will quickly differentiate yourself as an authority in your field which will lead to better brand awareness, credibility and sales.

5. Self-service portals facilitate better user experience

Remember those people who would rather clean toilets than spend any time on hold with your customer service department?

Well, installing the right kind of self-service portal or software will save them from having to clean those toilets after all.

When customers do not feel their root canals flaring up when they think of dealing with your brand, then you have achieved a great deal when it comes to improving their customer experience.

Provide them with the solutions they need in an easy to access and navigate the self-service portal, and you will greatly increase your chances of gaining and retaining highly satisfied customers.

People do not like it when you inconvenience their lives. Especially not when dealing with something as important as their insurance.

By making it easy for them to interact with your insurance company to get solutions to the problems they need through a self- service portal such as Salesforce, you will be setting yourself apart as a company that cares about customer satisfaction; one that is forward thinking.