How to grow your insurance business

Since Thursday is Car Insurance Day, it seemed like a good time to talk to agents about how they can grow their business in spite of the GEICOs, Progressives and other big insurance companies.

On a Relationship Marketing Weekly video from a few months back, Kody Bateman interviews independent agent/broker Bret Weston, to find out how Bret has been able to maintain a 95% retention rate and a 90% referral business over the past five years.

According to Bret:

We’re really trying to find a way to separate ourselves from the 1-800 call numbers, the Progressives, the GEICOs, all those people and really the one way we’ve done that is to develop the customer experience with that relationship with our clients through different facets and hopefully talk to a few of those, about those today on this chat.

The way that you beat those companies is to build a real relationship with your clients...to add value that the other guys can't. Kody asked Bret about some of the key times that he reaches out to clients:

You’ve already mentioned that creating the relationship, being more one on one with people, more intimate with them, being available by the cell phone or whatever at any time of the day, you mentioned those kinds of things. In our pre-show, you talked a little bit about key times. There are some key times to reach out to a new customer. You mentioned when they come on for the first time, you call it onboarding. So when they come on for the first time, you do some things then. Anniversary dates, you reach out to them and when a claim – this is interesting to me. Anytime a claim is made, you reach out to them in a unique way.

When you screw up – this is what I thought was interesting is when you have errors, when your office has errors, you reach out to them. Can you share with us those key touch points? What are the kinds of things that you do to reach out during those key touch points starting with when you bring on a brand new customer?

Bret talks a little about some of the ways they maintain that personal contact with the clients:

Yeah, exactly. Then moving from there, the interaction of a claim. That’s a huge time for people. It’s where they’re kind of confused. They’re kind of lost. They’re kind of feeling not all alone. But in a sense, kind of disconnected, not knowing what’s going on. So we send them a card reassuring them that we have their back. We send them the one with the lady bent over backwards from SendOutCards which again with some gummy bears. We try to keep it light-hearted, not really serious. Then from there, we follow up with a call with them usually on a weekly basis after that card gets sent out.

Again, my customer service manager, she has full access to SendOutCards and her ability to establish that relationship of hey, we made a mistake. Here’s a little treat or a goodie. We apologize. Please let us know if there’s anything else we can do.
So really just a great way of softening them up for our phone call or our apologies and stuff like that. But then the anniversary card is definitely the most popular. We get comments all the time from people’s spouses of hey, you’re sending my spouse some anniversary card and it’s usually really – again really light-hearted, something like, “Hey, sweetheart. We’re glad we’re still married to you.” It’s the anniversary of when they became a client of ours.

So it’s a very popular card. We usually send brownies or chocolates or caramels or whatever we kind of feel like we want to send out there, so yeah.

But how much does all of this cost? A card, by itself, costs about $1.75 and that includes tax and postage (the actual amount might vary by a few cents depending on your local sales tax rate) plus the card is mailed for you...you never have to worry about filling out the card, addressing the envelope, putting the card in the envelope and getting it to the post office; while a card with a box of brownies will cost about $10.00, again including tax and shipping.

Is it worth a few dollars a year to you to have a 95% retention rate as well as a 90% referral based business? A few dollars a year to GEICO proof your business?

Be sure you watch the video. And try out SendOutCards...the first card is on me.

Interesting days

Today - Inane Answering Message Day and Croissant Day

Tomorrow - Backward Day, Inspire Your Heart With Art Day and Gorilla Suit Day

Next Tuesday - Lame Duck Day and Frozen Yogurt Day

February 30 - No February 30th, no interesting days