5 Technology Platforms Every Insurance Agent Needs

5 Technology Platforms Every insurance Agent Needs

Today we will be digging into 5 technology platforms that every health insurance agent needs. Technology is a huge component of the success of every insurance agent. You want to be able to automate as many repetitive tasks as possible and spend your time focusing on client acquisition and building relationships.

1) Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

The first and most important platform every agent needs is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. A CRM is a vital tool for agent success and the cornerstone of all sales and marketing. This is where you’ll track everything from client follow-up to your notes, plan selections, and marketing campaigns. Automation is key, and a CRM is a great way to automate repetitive tasks like marketing campaigns, sending texts and emails, note templates, etc. This frees up time for you to prospect for more clients and grow your book of business.

Benefits of a CRM- 

• Manage your clients and communication- ensures you know exactly what’s happening, when it’s happening, and you have a history of everything.
• Don’t let your client’s needs slip through the cracks- don’t use paper notes. Everything should be entered in your CRM so you and your staff can access it at any moment.
• Follow up with your clients in a timely fashion- you should know when the last time you reached out to a client was. 
• Proactive servicing - don’t wait for your clients to come to you. Add them to a quarterly newsletter, or send emails spotlighting a product they may not be aware of. It may result in them letting you know about a servicing item, further solidifying your relationship as their trusted advisor. 
• Increase loyalty and customer retention- the goal is to have long-term clients, and a good CRM will help make that happen.

CRM Options-

• Infusionsoft/Keap
• Salesforce
• Hubspot
• Zoho
• Microsoft Dynamics
• Compass Presentation Navigator (CPN)

2) Quoting & Presentation Automation

It is so important that you have a good platform to automate the quoting and presentation. Most quoting platforms don’t automate your presentation for you, and some of the platforms that we’ll list below are more for quoting and not presenting. 

How are you presenting the value that you provide to your clients and prospects? What are you telling them that you’re going to be doing for them? How are you selling yourself? A quoting platform is not going to do those things. You’re going to sell based on price if you use only a quoting platform… and you will eventually lose on price as well. 

Things to Look for with Quoting Platforms- 

• Reduce the need to go to multiple carrier websites- everything should be in one place, saving you time on every quote.
• Quote multiple products in one presentation- quote health, medicare, group, life, and supplements in one place.
• Quote products nationwide
• Easily analyze plans side-by-side- show clients in a clean comparison all the plan details and even do a detailed plan analysis in seconds.
• Automate your quoting, presentation, analysis, and client follow-up- with one click send your client all the brochures, cost breakdown, provider search link, etc.
• Proven Presentation- stop using a yellow legal pad! Use a proven presentation that can also be done in an online screen share.
• With one click send all follow-up costs, benefits, and brochures 
• Educate prospects the right way for industry-leading persistency- make sure your client understands what they’re getting and why they’re getting it. If you’re educating them on everything there is no need for a high-pressure close. 

Quoting Platforms-

• Quotit- it can accomplish some of what we’ve talked about but not everything. You can get it in some places at no cost.
• HealthSherpa- very popular option for quoting ACA. It won’t help with cross-selling other products like life or ancillary and cannot quote Medicare.
• Healthcare.gov- in our opinion, this is the worst option. A consumer can run a quote and enroll themselves with this same site, it adds no credibility to you as the agent.
• Medicare.gov- this is a great tool for seeing all of the available plan options or doing a provider and prescription search. It should not be used for presenting to clients, and there is no way to cross-sell.
• Compass CPN- this platform does everything we discussed above. It has a proven presentation, handles all quoting in one platform, and client follow-up automation. It makes the agent’s life so much easier and frees up time for growing your book of business.

Learn more about our technology solutions here → careerswithcompass.com/technology

3) Scheduling Automation

Having a good platform for scheduling automation is crucial. This is not something that you want to be doing manually. When you automate your scheduling it also gives clients and leads the opportunity to schedule an appointment themselves. You want a scheduling platform that has personalized booking links that you can add to your email signature, your website, social media pages, and other places to make it easy to do business with you. A good scheduling platform will also help increase your appointment show rate by sending the client follow-up text and email reminders about the appointment.

Things to Look for with Scheduling Platforms

• Save time with personalized booking links
• Increase show rate with automated reminders 

Scheduling Platforms-

• AppointmentCore
• Calendly 
• Capterra
• Compass CPN

4) Online Meeting Platform

It’s pretty much expected in this day and age, especially post COVID that most meetings are conducted online. It’s also efficient and saves people on travel time.

Online Meeting Platform Expectations

• Video conference with your clients
• Essential/expected since COVID
• Moving online isn’t as hard as you think- do a few trial runs, make sure they can see your screen, audio is clear, and dress professionally.
• Compass provides training on this 

Online Meeting Platforms

• Zoom- free account option
• Google Meet- very easy to use
• UberConference- no cost
• Microsoft Teams- more popular in business to business environment
• Compass CPN- integrated with Google Meet

5) Policy Tracker

Most agents don’t have a policy tracker in place. A policy tracker will help you check and balance what you’re seeing versus what the carriers might show is happening. This is the best way to reconcile your commission statements and ensure you’re getting paid on every policy written.

Policy Tracker Details

• Track all the policies you wrote
• Carriers make mistakes- this is the easiest way to catch those mistakes and complete any cleanup needed.
• Reconcile your book of business to make sure you’re getting paid on all policies- this is something we recommend doing monthly.
• Agents can miss out on thousands of dollars by not reconciling their Book of Business with carriers.
• Know the score!- Know where you are and exactly what you’ve written in comparison to the goals you’ve set for yourself. 

The Compass Difference

• The CPN is the only complete technology solution for agents on the market. It acts as your CRM by doing all of your marketing automation, scheduling automation, quoting, and then building a custom dynamic presentation every time you’re prepping for a client meeting. It also has an easy side-by-side cost comparison, plan analysis tool, and with one click your client follow-up automation is complete. 
• Custom for insurance agents- we built the CPN from scratch with insurance agents in mind, and feedback from agents in the field. We’re making improvements every year based on agent feedback.
• No cost to Compass agents- Compass technology is no cost to agents who partner with us.
• The CPN has saved agents $600-$700/month in technology costs- it has also helped agents increase their ability to cross-sell. Average agents in the insurance industry with ACA have an average first-year commission of $450/ year. Compass agents using the CPN have an average first-year commission of $840/ year per ACA client and over $4,000 in lifetime commissions.

Visit careerswithcompass.com to learn more about the Compass Presentation Navigator and becoming a Compass agent.