insurance brokers upgrade

It’s a sad fact that the majority of insurance brokers are still using technology from the 20th century, and as a result, they are taking significant risks with their companies.

Many people may have just about figured out how to use IT-based accounting systems, email, and online submission of compliance paperwork. However, they frequently fall short when it comes to employing technology to assist offer real business benefits, such as increasing customer loyalty and satisfaction or maintaining regulatory compliance. Other financial services organisations, after a slow start, are adopting digital technology to help them work smarter, which stands in stark contrast to this. These can include insurance companies offering profitable new products based on data analysis and “pay-per-use” models, to challenger banks tailoring their services based on their understanding of specific clients’ demands.

And if insurance brokers don’t quickly catch up to them in their transition into the 21st century, some of them may eventually go out of business, especially when it comes to adopting technology to organise and analyse their data.

Becoming irrelevant to your clients

One of the greatest benefits that brokers provide is the ability to deliver a bespoke service tailored to individual needs, based on a thorough understanding of clients – particularly when the insurance required is not a straightforward “off the peg” product. This is especially true in the face of growing competition from online comparison sites. In the past, you might have communicated with clients in-person or over the phone, and you presumably still do. However, as your new prospects age and become more likely to manage their lives and enterprises online, it gets harder to bring in new clients the old ways, and “broker disintermediation” (or, to put it another way, irrelevance) becomes a more likely possibility.

By continuing with your conventional business practises, you can be more and more certain that you’ll lose that in-depth understanding of your clients and that you’ll be perceived as a superfluous – and maybe time-consuming and expensive – roadblock between you and the product they require. 

Making your customers feel unloved

Younger customers entering the market place have higher expectations from the companies they do business with, especially when buying services and especially when paying money for monotonous but necessary expenses, like insurance. Make sure they realise when you approach them that you know absolutely nothing about them. 

Or, you might use an automated marketing system that enables you to stay in touch with your customers after you’ve made a sale, giving them helpful information and customer service. This will allow you to grow loyalty—and high-value repeat business without any need to work on your own. 

Ensuring your data is not GDPR compliant

Breaking the new GDPR guidelines about how you utilise your customer data is one of the best ways to damage your business quickly. By failing to use and secure your data in accordance with the new standards, you run the risk of incurring a significant punishment (up to 4% of your annual revenue), which could have a significant negative impact on your bottom line. Not to mention the severe reputational damages that would result from it, which might particularly impact any word-of-mouth referrals you may have relied on in the past to bring in new business. 

Regardless of the IT system you employ, as long as your data management practises are ethical, you won’t go afoul of the law. In order to know whether you have a legal basis for contact with a specific person or not and what kind of contact you can have, such as just for customer service or perhaps for marketing new products, it is important to keep your marketing lists and records up to date. You should also keep a clear record of the level of contact the client has agreed to. Naturally, you must then adhere to it.

By Anurag Rathod

Anurag Rathod is an Editor of Appclonescript.com, who is passionate for app-based startup solutions and on-demand business ideas. He believes in spreading tech trends. He is an avid reader and loves thinking out of the box to promote new technologies.