Insurance Policy Number Management Made Easy

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems have become an integral part of any business that deals with more than a handful of clients.

Insurance companies, for example, deal with hundreds of thousands of clients at any given time. All these people need to be attended to satisfactorily and efficiently.

While it is possible to outsource your customer service department and hire a team big enough to serve all these people, the cost will not only be astronomical; it will also be unmanageable.

The best way to go about it is to find a balance between providing the right number of customer service agents to talk to those clients who insist on speaking to a human being on the line as well as giving those who would rather not call in a viable option to help themselves.

That is where online self-service platforms such as Salesforce come into play.

Online Policy Number Management

There is research to suggest that a vast majority of your clients prefer NOT to call in when they have an issue.

They would rather be empowered enough to try and solve the problem themselves. The numbers say that 73% of consumers would rather wash a toilet than be put on hold when trying to contact customer support.

Having a platform that allows customers to carry out a bit of self-service; solve their own problems, is one of the best ways to ensure that you not only educate your clients but that you also keep them happy and loyal.

With the right kind of online policy number management system in place, your customers can do much more than just lodge claims or complaints.

The Benefits of Having an Online Policy Management System

 To the client, these benefits include:

• Registering for eDocuments: they can simply register their emails to get their insurance bills and other policy documents delivered to them via email as opposed to snail mail.

• Update account information: they can quickly and easily update their account information and feed in vital data that could help your marketing department to come up with a viable sales and marketing plan to target specific demographics.

• They can change their payment plans: by giving your customers this kind of flexibility, you stand a better chance of retaining their business as opposed to being rigid about your payments in which case they will quickly find better offers from your competitors.

• Set up electronic funds transfers: some customers do not like being bothered each year about policy renewal. Sometimes, they simply forget to renew their policies because they get so busy. With the right online policy number management system in place, these kinds of customers can simply set up an electronic funds transfer that automatically pays for their policy each year. They also get alerted through the same system should the terms of their policy change.

• Get notifications in a timely manner: instead of waiting for the mail to arrive, customers enrolled in your online policy number management will get any notifications in a timely fashion via their email addresses.

The good thing about having a robust online policy management system in place is that it doesn't only serve the best interest of your clients as an insurance company (although this is the big one) it also makes your internal operations a lot more efficient. This can actually save you money and greatly improve your service delivery.

Why Insurance Companies Need an Online Policy Number Management System

Last year, the insurance company "Lemonade" made headlines when their online A.I, Jim broke the world record by receiving an online claim, reviewing it and processing it in just 3 seconds! Imagine that!!

Instead of insurance policy claims taking weeks to process; costing hours in manpower and greatly inconveniencing your customers who have to go out of their way to meet your claims adjusters, they can simply log in online and get it done in a matter of seconds.

That is efficiency at its best. Most forward-thinking insurance companies have started emulating this innovation and now embrace the digital transformation that is here to make lives much easier and more efficient.

Allstate Insurance, for example, has the QuickFoto appraisal app that allows their customers to take quick pictures of the accident scene, send those into their claims adjuster and get their claim processed in a matter of hours/days all through their mobile devices.

It is all about making the lives of your customers much easier and streamlining how they interact with you as their insurance company.

Some advantages of making insurance policy management easy for the company include:

• More efficient claims processing: if your clients can simply populate all the information claims adjusters need to review online then their claims can be processed that much faster thus making your organization more efficient.

• It improves your sales and marketing output: one of the main reasons insurance companies see a high customer attrition rate is because they have a limited amount of contact with these clients (they only communicate when they need clients to renew their policies or when the client has a complaint).

  By providing your clients with a robust online policy number management system that allows them to input all the important information and data about themselves and their insurance needs, you can analyze that data and come up with the right sales and marketing strategy to target each demographic based on their needs.

• It minimizes your need for customer service agents: the best self-service portals provide the customer with all the information they may need to solve any issues they may have. This greatly minimizes their need to call in and speak to a live person which, in turn, minimizes your need to hire live people.

We live in a world where everyone would rather do everything online through their handheld devices. Millennials, in particular, are very picky about having to physically walk into an office to get attended to.

If you want to capture this burgeoning market and keep your already existing clients happy as an insurance company, then you need to provide them with a user-friendly online policy number management system like Salesforce.

One of the greatest advantages of using the Salesforce system, in particular, is that it allows you to identify trends as they happen.

Since the CRM is cloud-based, these subtle shifts in the marketplace such as a growing preference for a certain product or a decrease in sales in a certain region are captured and the data is available to the relevant personnel as long as they have an internet connection and login rights.

To learn more about Salesforce for your business, click here to set up a free consultation.