When it comes to growing your insurance agency’s book of business, lead management is one of the key factors that separate thriving insurance agencies from agencies that struggle to grow their business. In essence, agencies must focus their efforts on converting leads into sales. Doing so isn’t just a numbers game, it is also about being able to plan effectively and follow through with those plans to win over new business.
In most cases, the perfect time for an agent to write new business is around the time that a potential client’s policies are due for renewal. “X-dating” can be described as steps taken by insurance agents and brokers that enable them to recognize when a prospective client's insurance policy approaches its renewal date. Insurance agents who deal with hundreds of clients whose policy information is spread across an agency’s AMS and CRM systems, usually have a difficult time identifying X-Dates for these policies. This has a detrimental impact on their ability to pinpoint the perfect time to contact a client, schedule meetings, and drive appropriate communications. The solution is not more InsurTech applications, but an integration solution that can consolidate, integrate, and orchestrate data from different systems, providing agents with a clean, complete view of their clients’ information. Having a clear view of client data allows agents to perform accurate and timely x-dating that will help improve sales conversion rates.
Insurance agents tend to rely on different systems to manage their business. When it comes to new business, many agents don’t have a good process to handle them. Agents are still depending on dated processes to identify when a client’s policy is due for renewal and set up reminders to contact the client before the renewal date. These processes can be as old as sticky note reminders on a desk or setting up calendar reminders that go unnoticed.
Another situation that makes x-dating challenging for agents is gaining a complete view of their clients' profiles. This is especially challenging if a client has policies containing fractured information that exist within multiple siloed insurance systems. The inability to get a holistic view of the client prevents agents from taking advantage of multi-policy discounts and selling a greater number of policies that provide their clients with more coverage at an affordable premium.
One way to help with this process would be to run a report to identify multi-policy sales opportunities. However, there is no easy and effective way to build a report. Reports are time-consuming to generate, and by the time they are ready, the insights from that report may not be relevant. What's more, the data used to compile the report may be inaccurate and filled with duplicate data and errors that affect the validity of the report.
Successful x-dating to increase an agent's chance of acquiring new business and boost cross-selling opportunities is all about understanding data and using it to predict clients' behaviors. Agents must remember to contact clients before their current policies are renewed with another agency. If an agent waits until the last minute to try to win over a client's business, it will be too late to close the deal. The key here is to engage with the client ahead of their policy renewal date in order to have enough time to set up a meeting and demonstrate value.
If an agent cannot access the right information about their client at the right time, they are destined for failure.
Insurance agencies need a platform that can empower them to access the data they need when they need it. A Data Integration Hub (DIH) can make that possible. Through system integration, Synatic provides agents with a 360-degree view of all their clients’ profiles. In addition, The DIH allows agents to access product information from carriers and seamlessly overlay that data with client profiles to strategically structure the best insurance package for a client when it is time for their policy to be renewed.
Using Synatic, agencies can also extract data from their operational systems and store the data in Synatic’s built-in data warehouse. Because Synatic’s data warehouse is built into the platform, collating disparate data sources into one single central store that is cleansed of all errors is significantly simpler. This makes generating reports and actionable data infinitely faster and more efficient.
By consolidating, integrating, and orchestrating data, agents can obtain a 360-degree view of a client's profile allowing them to engage with their prospective client sooner rather than later, and more regularly. This gives agents the ability to build good a rapport with the client and present them with a quote when they are most open to receiving it.
Trying to manage leads and consolidating the related data that exists in different systems, with several data integration tools, makes it difficult for agents to be agile and to quickly take advantage of potential sales opportunities. Synatic’s Data Integration Hub offers a single unified platform that can identify, collect, and contextualize disparate data across an agency’s disparate solution stack. This enables agencies to improve data visibility and deliver data that is meaningful and ready to use come policy renewal time. To find out how you can improve x-dating in order to boost sales conversion rates, contact Synatic today.
