The insurance industry has constantly been evolving over the years. While technological advancement is transforming how people avail insurance protection, many users still prefer the face-to-face route, i.e., via insurance agents. Therefore, the experience that customers or clients have with insurance agents impacts the insurance company’s success by a great deal. But, one of the biggest challenges insurance companies face is how to keep insurance agents motivated.
Agents and insurance firms are going through multiple interlinked changes, marking the agent experience more critical than ever. They are tested on several fronts driven by changing consumer behaviors, the rise of online channels, and flexible and just-in-time service.
A motivated agent can grow and sustain your business. When the agent is engaged with their clients, s/he looks for opportunities to improve their relationships and is open to analyzing their performance.
So, how should you motivate insurance agents at your company? While you may not control some work environment factors, you can do things as a leader or a manager to create a motivational work environment. In this blog, we have listed some of the critical measures which insurance companies can leverage to improve insurance agent experience, keep them motivated, and ultimately boost engagement and help the business grow.
1. Set smart goals
Goal setting is one of the practical ways to motivate people. Often companies use it as a method to measure agents’ productivity. When smart (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) goals are set, they can be empowering and help ensure your agents and business are on track to meet the firms’ long-term goals.
2. Provide personalized and interactive training
Opportunities for training are essential to keep agents engaged. Interactive training helps agents learn new ways of accomplishing their tasks and improving their sales. Leveraging gamification mechanics such as badges, leaderboards, levels, quizzes, and more, can help agents complete their training effectively and ensure top-of-the-mind recall about the insurance product features and benefits.
Amway, the world’s largest direct-selling company, leveraged Upshot.ai’s insurance solution to increase the adoption of its digital learning platform, leading to higher course completion by salespersons. To achieve this, Amway employed upshot.ai to gamify the learning experience and experienced a massive increase of 112% in the number of users completing courses.
3. Provide agents with the tools to thrive in a digital world
The world of insurance is packed with paperwork. Many familiar processes for insurance agents include repetitive, mundane, and time-consuming tasks. Investing in digital tools can automate specific processes and improve the agent experience. Moreover, It will help agents to focus more on prospecting new clients and managing their existing clientele.
4. Support continued engagement with customers
Insurance companies should develop strategies to deliver a personalized experience based on the customers’ interactions with agents and keep insurance agents motivated. Typically, agents are the conduits for long-term relationships with customers. The cost of agent turnover can be expensive and eventually leads to the loss of policyholders and valuable business.
5. Be transparent with your agents
Transparency is essential for building and maintaining trust. Agents appreciate knowing key actions, such as late claim payment, to manage customers’ expectations. Insurance companies should invest in technologies that serve the policyholders’ needs and keep the agents informed of what’s going on with the customers.
6. Leverage gamification to improve agent productivity
Gamification has already helped insurers improve customer engagement and agent collaboration. Gamification can boost the agent’s performance, improve sales and overall agent experience-
- Leaderboards to create competition: This is a key aspect of any gamification system. Leaderboards can increase engagement, competitiveness and get agents to perform better.
- Offer rewards motivate agents: Rewards can encourage agents to perform better. Using points, badges, coins, etc., can increase efficiency, increase a sense of accomplishment, and social bragging rights.
Wrapping up
Efforts taken to improve agents’ productivity and efficiency can result in improved customer satisfaction and business growth. Considering that agents are typically the first point of contact with customers, it is recommended that companies take steps to keep insurance agents motivated to perform their best by allocating adequate resources toward their growth and development. Schedule a demo and take the first step toward agent motivation.
Also read: How can insurance companies tackle the long silence between engagements with their customers
About Upshot.ai
Upshot.ai is an omnichannel, user engagement, and gamification platform that helps digital product owners and marketers improve their product adoption and conversions. Fortune 1000 companies such as Amway, GE, UHG, Puma, Sony, ITC, and Tenet Healthcare are using upshot.ai and observed a massive increase in product adoption and YoY increment in revenues.
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