Salesforce for Insurance: How to Retain Your Customers During Economic Slowdown?

Economic slowdowns are hard. Specific to the Insurance industry, fewer businesses and individuals allocate their money to spend on insurance despite its importance. With slower top-line growth, it’s more critical than ever to protect what you have – the existing policyholders. Therefore, the focus of insurers should be on closing as many renewals as possible, closing them on time, and finding areas to upsell.

Look up any study and it would confidently claim that it costs 5 to 25 times more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one. Even though the number may be debated and experts have tried to debunk this rule of thumb, the fact remains that a paying customer would offer higher customer lifetime value (CLTV) than a  prospective policy buyer. As such, the belief still stands true in the context of insurance, or any other industry for that matter.

If anything, the need to retain customers becomes more pronounced in a sector like insurance, which heavily relies on policy renewals and complementary service delivery for business sustenance. However, customer retention has gotten progressively tougher with several Insuretech players swarming into the market and using various technology-led differentiators to poach customers. Fortunately, with the right set of new-age technologies, skills, and strategies, your sales team can master the art of retaining customers. While there is no dearth of options available in the market when it comes to the ‘tools’ part of sales enablement, Salesforce for insurance companies can be a powerful tool that will act as a magnet for your existing customers. Salesforce accounts for over 16% of the total insurance application software followed by other giants like Microsoft, Guidewire, and SAP. Here’s a look at how insurers prefer to use Salesforce to win over customers – over and over again.

How Can Salesforce Help With Customer Retention in Insurance?

First things, let’s gain a brief overview of what Salesforce is so that we can link it to its role in customer retention in insurance.

Salesforce is a cloud-based SaaS platform aimed at supercharging a business’s sales and marketing efforts while also automating various business operations. It comes equipped with various digital solutions such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to strengthen engagement-led relationships with customers including policyholders. As for the capabilities that one may find missing in Salesforce for insurance companies, you always have the option to integrate it with other digital tools and platforms to augment the sales team.

Given this background, it is evident that Salesforce can play an instrumental role in managing and event-based tracking insurance policies and elevating the customer experience across different touchpoints. Businesses can use Salesforce insurance solutions to personalize insurance policies and communications, manage insurance policy life cycles, expedite claims adjustment, disburse claims settlement, and send reminders for renewal.

Here’s a look at the role of Salesforce for insurance companies across the value chain:

Prospecting

Modern-day insurance sales reps need to perform smart outreach over digital channels as well as leverage old-school techniques like cold-calling. Salesforce can help them make the right choice that matches the prospect preferences while also directing them to the hotspots of potential customers. The demographic insights in Salesforce help sales teams prioritize their efforts on a certain segment of prospects to maximize their probability of business generation.  

Lead Generation

While prospecting targets outbound leads, you may also have inbound leads – potential customers who have shown an interest in your insurance products, either by visiting your website or following you over social media or enrolling for an event, etc. Salesforce captures the lead information so that insurance companies can translate this interest into revenue opportunities.

Lead Qualification

Inbound and outbound leads need to undergo a process known as lead qualification wherein you evaluate whether they are the right choice for your insurance products or services. Salesforce automates the process through an intuitive lead-scoring algorithm that you can configure to ascribe scores that help you qualify, prioritize and chase leads.

Customer Engagement

Salesforce centralizes customer information and preferences, which makes it easier for the sales, marketing, and support teams to make their respective interactions as frictionless as possible. At the same time, it is possible to front-load value at every touchpoint, which will further heighten customer engagement. Salesforce can drive proactive event-based conversations with customers with an aim to maximize revenue while building a loyal customer base. Example: Offering a discounted life insurance product just before the birthday with a customized message. 

Policy Personalization

With Salesforce, you have a fleshed-out and detailed profile of each and every customer. As such, it allows you to tweak the policy and personalize it such that every policy is distinct and caters to the specific requirements (or risks) of the customer. Policy personalization may hedge your chances of renewal.

Policy Management

Salesforce Insurance Policy Administration allows businesses to manage the policy lifecycle, right from digital quoting, issuance, billing, renewals, and more! Such an approach to documenting policies reduces paperwork and also introduces transparency, which can earn you customer goodwill.

Claims Settlement

Seeing as how Salesforce helps with customer database management and policy management, it comes as no surprise that it also helps expedite and automate claims settlement to the extent that the claims adjustment amount gets directly credited to the customer’s account. Salesforce also allows policyholders to lodge a claim easily, eliminate unnecessary touchpoints and reduce the need to provide information multiple times. It can also automate adjudication and other aspects to reduce operational expenses for insurers. With such convenience and benefits, who would not want to stick around?

Customer Support

Customer support is an integral component of customer retention as it involves all post-sales interactions. From helping customers comprehend the terms of their policy to guiding them while reporting the first notice of loss (FNOL), agents require all the help they need to truly extend customer support – and Salesforce is available to offer the same.

In simple words, Salesforce makes insurers more customer-centric business by equipping the sales team with the right tools and information to make them more efficient and customer-friendly. The resulting convenience arising from the customer resting at the heart of every business operation or activity lays the foundation for higher customer satisfaction and customer retention.

Conclusion

As seen above, Salesforce can be used across the lengths and breadths of the insurance sector. However, the pathway to embracing Salesforce in the insurance industry will only yield results if you are successful in implementing and managing it in a manner that serves its purpose of sales enablement. As such, don’t shy from seeking the assistance of a trusted Salesforce gold consulting partner to stay ahead of the curve and unlock the true potential of Salesforce insurance solutions.