Customer Relationship Management for the Insurance Industry
Most mainstream Customer Relationship Management
systems are excellent at what they do:
- Keep track of communications with clients/prospects
- Keep track of tasks associated with clients/prospects
- Remind appropriate staff of tasks that need to occur
- Assist staff with moving prospects through the pipeline and converting them to customers
These are critical features for almost any business and attempting to accomplish these without some sort of automated system in place is foolhardy.
But what about industry specific features? What do we need in the Insurance business that might be different than other businesses? Let’s name a few:
- Goal Management
Producers drive the growth of an organization by their performance. Producers drive themselves by their own goals, not those of the organization. Where is this goal information kept? Typically, it’s in some spreadsheet or Word document. - Sales Meeting Management
Sales meetings are an awesome opportunity to tap into the company knowledge base: you and the producers. When you use that information to arm your producers for their next call, how do you organize, strategize and maintain what you are creating? Again, if at all, it’s probably separate from your CRM. - Differentiation Management
Over time you build a library of wedges (proactive service differentiators). Where are these kept? How are they related to the prospects/customers? - Introduction Management
Perhaps the most powerful source of new, desirable clients is your existing client base. As your producers mine these customers for introductions, where are the conversations tracked? In my more than two decades of consulting I’ve seen all sorts of attempts at managing this data. If it’s not directly integrated into the CRM, it becomes a burden. More often than not, tasks that become burdens eventually cease to be executed.
So what do you do? Well you can customize some off-the-shelf solution. It’s definitely possible. Likely it will be expensive. If you can afford it, go for it.
As it happens, I’ve integrated all of this in our iWin 951 system.
