The 4 Best Broker Practices in the Era of Online Shopping

What do clients who are shopping for group insurance want? Are insurance brokers listening? Since the arrival of Bill 141, insurers can sell online. The inevitable result: there’s no longer a need to go through an intermediary. With the future of group insurance brokers compromised, how can you stand out in this industry? To enhance your value as a broker, here are the 4 best practices to observe in the industry:

1. Offer preventative training

The policies sold to your customers provide you with key information about the problems experienced by their employees. For example, you can quantify stress in the work environment, work accidents, absenteeism, etc. Several brokers are already using this data to build custom workshops. So you can offer preventative training, such as healthy lifestyle or accident prevention. By doing so, you will reduce the number of employee claims and medication purchased by them. In fact, this will lower the cost of insurance policies. For customers, this is an effective way to offer additional benefits to their employees while keeping them healthy and therefore more productive.

TIP ➤ Offer this type of workplace workshop for free. This will strengthen your relevance as a broker. In addition, you can take advantage of these training courses to introduce other services you offer to the company and its employees.

2. Make your customers ambassadors of your products

Some brokers leverage their corporate client network. They use it as a distribution channel for their personal insurance products, or those of partner individual insurance brokers. For example, they create unique offers for insured executive employees, which may be offered to them by their employer. In these situations, the information gathered and experience of the group insurance broker are put to good use, as you offer employees turnkey and personalized insurance.

TIP ➤ Thank your customer ambassadors by creating more favourable rates for their employees, focusing on volume.

3. Analyze and leverage your data thanks to cutting-edge BMS solutions

By developing your insurance offer horizontally, sharing your data between different groups in your organization becomes an invaluable source of value. Your knowledge of the needs of your customers’ employees certainly allows you to establish personalized offers. But it is also an opportunity to open up your sales channels. You can then develop products beyond insurance and offer the services of partners adapted to their situation. For example, you could also offer health and wellness workshops or group purchasing in life or automobile insurance. An adapted BMS (Broker Management System) allows you to better monitor the performance of the various insurance policies sold. In doing so, you can target marketing initiatives based on their types of policies, profiles and claims by generalizing the trends observed among your customers. By expanding your service offer, your data becomes an invaluable resource. Cross-selling is no longer an ideal, but a constant source of income. And it is built on a solid foundation: a software solution capable of leveraging the data you have in real time.

TIP ➤ By having in-depth knowledge of your customers thanks to your BMS solution, you will be able to develop personalized product offers that respond to their real insurance needs. This will also allow you to meet their emotional needs.

For example, you could offer the following to certain customers:

• health and wellness workshops
• yoga classes
• chair massages

4. Develop personalized products from your portfolio of policies

In addition to developing a relationship with individuals, it’s important to enhance the value provided to your business customers directly through your insurance products. The information gathered about them over the years is therefore very useful. It allows you to spot trends in the industries you work with and to create new exclusive insurance products tailored to specific industry needs. Better yet, you can analyze all your insurance products, by setting up claim submission portals in the colours of each broker. You can then use this data to create personalized policies for each of your customers. In this way, you can offer them the best possible product when approaching them for a policy renewal or a cross coverage offer.

TIP ➤ Use business intelligence tools to perform this kind of manipulation in a fully automated and continuous way. You’ll be able to constantly develop your products according to the changing needs of your customers.

From paperwork to relationships

Long story short, a huge part of your daily life as broker is lost filling out paperwork, exchanging with insurers, etc. However, the most rewarding work is the development of the customer relationship and consulting. Unfortunately, fewer and fewer brokers have the time necessary to work on this quality relationship. By using the best tools to implement these 4 practices, you will be able to make the best of the privileged relationship you have with your customers. And this will allow you to increase your value as a broker. Of course, each clientele and relationship is unique. It’s therefore always up to you to analyze your situation in order to see which services or products would allow you to set yourself apart while making yourself indispensable to your customers. Do you have questions about the best approaches to modernize your offer? Contact our experts for personalized advice.