Call Center in Insurance Industry: Is It Must-Have?

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The call center is one of the first points of contact between customers and your company. It can have both positive and negative impacts on their decision. Why is the call center so important in the insurance industry and how can you benefit from it?

What is an Insurance Call Center?

An insurance call center is a must-have feature because of the specialties of the business. The goal of an insurance call center is to win customers` trust and provide them with the highest quality of service.

The insurance industry is very competitive, and clients also want to discover much information about tariffs, legal issues, conditions, and other details. That’s why a contact center solution for the insurance industry is a really important part of their strategy and it has to fit all requirements.

The insurance call center has to provide many options - massive inbound and outbound calls, processing dozens of requests, and managing the work of different departments. Even the industry itself is difficult to understand for common people, so your sales team should be both qualified and skillful in speaking with consumers to convince them to reach an agreement.

Quality of consumer service, as well as superior customer experience, are significant rates in the insurance industry. A customer base with a high satisfaction rate can become regular clients because most people prefer to choose an insurance agency once in life.

Customers nowadays prefer to get answers quickly. Your insurance call center has to solve all customers` issues and provide them with responses to all their questions. The better agents will describe the benefits and all advantages, the more likely you’ll get the contract. It is worth the investment. 

Communication channels in the insurance call center

Despite we call it a “call center”, it offers various ways to communicate with your buyers - not only by phone. In the era of new technologies, clients prefer to achieve information through different channels, as well as the sales funnel should be built through different digital channels. By the way, some details should be discussed during the phone call, but some offers or news can be distributed using other digital channels. 

Live chat

Survey says that almost ¾ of clients are more willing to use live chat than other types of customer support service. It’s logical if we remember about self-service gaining popularity year by year. Customers like to solve their issues on their own or search for the information they need. This is also a great option because it makes agents less overloaded with routine answers and problems, which can be easily solved by customers without the help of a specialist. Providing such an option on your website is a great step to improving your customer service, especially because it doesn’t need a lot of spending on it. 

Phone call

The most obvious and the most important part of your insurance call center work. The insurance industry is sometimes too difficult for customers, so they need detailed explanations of all conditions, and there is no better way to do it than with the help of experienced specialists. Their goal is to describe all details to the client and convince clients to choose your insurance company and your service. This communication may contain dozens of questions, so your representative should be able to answer professionally and understandably. By the way, it is important to mention that in the insurance sphere inbound calls are not enough -  a contact center solution for the insurance industry should include an auto dialer for insurance agents to perform outbound calls. Outbound campaigns are one of the essential channels of lead generation and sales. In this case, predictive dialer systems can help you to pass the contact lists faster than they can be done with manual dialing. Predictive dialer performs massive outbound calls and passes through busy signals, answering machines, or invalid numbers to go for a new call.

E-mail

The most formal and one of the most preferred forms of communication for busy customers. There is no way for you to avoid using emails while you are in the insurance industry. All offers you send go through email, all discounts and special proposals are sent via email, and all documentation is sent by email. Even your formal communication with a consumer more often goes by emails. That’s why your contact center solution for the insurance industry must include tools to work with mailings because without them you can’t do business.

Which insurance call centers are the most common

The insurance industry has many departments, but there are three of the most popular and the most needed on the market. Each of them has its advanced features, specifics of the work process, and different target audience. By the way, the insurance market grows every year and this tendency is going to continue.

Health insurance

One of the most popular and fast-growing types of insurance, which has the highest rate of people who use the service in some countries. Common people, who use the services of this industry, often need many explanations and detailed guides provided by their insurer. That is the reason why you need a contact center that will bring you, consumers, help existing clients, and pass through the lead base. All these options are available in contact center software, here you can find out more about our insurance call center solution.

Cars

Another part of a market with dozens of millions of users. You can’t own a car without insurance, can you? That’s why it is also one of the most competitive and overloaded markets, where you have to pay attention to every single detail to tackle your competitors. It is possible to do with providing the highest quality customer service, and this goal can be achieved with an insurance call center. Your agents are the main element in the task to persuade clients to choose your service, while you need to start outbound campaigns using an auto dialer for insurance agents to find new clients.

Business

This type of insurance has the most specific audience and requires the best assistance because your buyers are business proprietors and they know how to select a vendor. Here is no way to communicate with them despite the contact center. Emails and calls are your main communication channels to provide customer support, make the deal, and inform your clients about news and offers. This market is also growing fast, so you need to start implementing a cloud-based call center solution, especially predictive dialer software for business insurance in the nearest time to beat competitors. 

Insurance contact center purpose

The contact center is the first point of contact between consumers and your firm. It can have both positive and negative impacts on their conclusion. Why is the cloud-based call center solution so important in the insurance industry and how can you benefit from it? What should you choose - Predictive dialer, Power dialer or Progressive dialer solution?

Decrease customer acquisition cost

Contact centers in the insurance industry can powerfully influence your CAC rate, in direct and indirect ways. To understand where the influence is, let’s remember the formula of CAC: choose the period you need (year, or half), and divide the sum of your marketing and sales spending by the number of new clients. The contact center is one of the main channels of sales, so your cloud-based call center solution cost and its conformity to the number of clients you have acquired using the contact center is an important rate. An insurance dialer based on a predictive dialer model can be a good tool for cold calling and acquiring new consumers.

Client retention

Voice communication, which is the main feature of a contact center, can greatly help you in customer retention. Every client, which has decided to stop cooperating with you, can be persuaded by your agents. Permanent contact via email or phone, special offers and discounts help to build war relations with a client, so he will be more likely to stay with you than leave. Here the power dialer system can be useful to reach more customers with less effort and have personalized communication with them.

Case management

Every interaction which is performed by your customers is an important source of information. All this data should be tracked and kept in one place for further analysis. This strategy allows you to correct all deficiencies that exist in your work processes. Cloud-based call center solution has options to track calls, record, and whisper. The whisper feature allows helping operators during the call using hints. These options also give a possibility to fix the theme of a conversation to understand the main purposes of requests and create corresponding call scripts and develop IVR to provide self-service for clients and unload agents. 

First Call Resolution

This is a very important rate, but still, it is difficult to be measured and even if it is near 100% it doesn’t mean that all clients got perfect customer service. Anyway, you can’t ignore this stat, because it directly influences your customer satisfaction rate. If FCR is low, your customers are disappointed with your service. The perfect solution is to solve clients` issues during the first call using info from the call script and knowledge base, but it is important to control the service and avoid opposition between FCR and the Average Call Duration (ACD) rate. 

Customer care

The biggest advantage of a contact center is that it offers the best customer care abilities. You can inform your leads of new proposals, promotions, changes in their contracts or conditions, or insurance policies. It is easy to perform via the automated calling feature of your insurance dialer. The needed messages will be sounded out by the voice bot, so the operators will have enough time for more personalized communication with the clients who are already interested in an offer. Service, provided by phone, is the fastest way to solve customer problems. Finally, customer care is a purpose of an insurance call center.

Some tips for insurance contact center

Every process has the best practices, which can bring an awaited result. Such methods exist also for an in-house insurance contact center, and their key goal is to increase efficiency, help to provide better customer service, and improve the quality of work of your agents. 

Measure all possible metrics

Some of the contact center metrics were mentioned by us higher, such as FCR or ACD rate. Anyway, you should calculate all available metrics - ASR, AHT, etc. Use of an insurance dialer also has many metrics which indicate its effectiveness. Even the tone of voice of your agents should be controlled. All these stats will help you to find mistakes and defects in work processes, so you will be able to solve them and analyze the reason why they appeared. 

Analyze your audience

All data which is available about the customer is useful. Even though with the help of a contact center solution for the insurance industry you can provide all information to your agents just before they start calling a client, it can be too less to make a deal. 

Fortunately, nowadays contact center solutions can integrate a CRM system into their interface, so you can collect and transfer all needed information - previous calls, call preferences, etc. - in one tool. This will help your agent to perform more conversions, while you will get better outcomes and more deals.

Choose the right time to call

It is well known, that the best time for cold calling is in the evening, and the best day for such calls is Thursday, but not Monday and Friday. Anyway, all target audiences are different, and some of them can prefer morning or afternoon calls to evening dials, while others are more likely to make deals on weekends. Noone besides you know your target audience better, so spend some time analyzing the preferences of your customers. This strategy will help you to provide better customer service, while your customers will have warmer relations with your company. 

Adapt to the client's liking

All people are different - and your customers too. The way your agent communicates with the client can influence his decision - to make the deal or to cancel it. Some people prefer formal communication, and it is a situation where long tales about the advantages of your service or the history of your company, or its market position are inappropriate. On the other hand, some people like discussing, and the average call duration with such happy customers can be much longer than it usually is. In summary, use that type of communication that is preferred by your customer - for an experienced agent it’s not difficult to determine how to talk with every single person. But to say the truth, to achieve such skills your reps should train and learn regularly, but this is a topic for another article.

Let people know who is calling

Only a few people will answer an unnamed phone call - for the US it is about 20% of Americans. This is not the best starting point, right? Use local phone numbers only to make people confident that you are linked with the region they`re living in. Use advanced features to show the name of your company, and such options are provided by many VoIP providers. Remember about identifying, because your cold calling campaigns will have no sense if there will be no one to answer. 

How to choose the right contact center solution for your in-house insurance contact center

It has been already determined that if you are working in the insurance industry, you need a contact center solution to perform better than your rivals. In the field of insurance, clients need explanations and details, and as it is a very competitive market, you should supply the client service perfectly in all details to enhance customer satisfaction. Without a qualitative approach and the right solution for your in-house insurance contact center, you will not be able to compete with other companies, which have upgraded their customer service and cold calling strategies to find new consumers. 

The main communication channels in an insurance contact center are email, phone, and live chat communication. All these options must be provided in the contact center to satisfy clients` necessities in self-service functions in pair with qualified assistance performed by experienced reps. The main purposes of your call center are: decreasing the cost of customer acquisition, more increased client retention rate, the possibility to manage cases in real-time, high FCR rate, and improving customer care.

To achieve good results, you should use some techniques which will boost the call center`s performance. Calculate metrics and analyze them, use local numbers, identify your calls and choose the right time depending on your customers` preferences. 

If you are confident that a qualitative, multi-optional, and easy-in-use insurance call center solution is your need, contact us to discover more about our solutions for your business.

 

Originally published on 2020-10-28, updated on 2022-07-15

Eugene Siuch

Content Manager and Copywriter

Focused on customer service measurement and improvement, SaaS marketing and industry insights, and researching different methods of staff motivation and performance management in the field of customer service providing.

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