Insurance brokers: 5 factors to finding the right management tool

Finding the right platform to manage various interactions is essential for a group insurance broker. Whether it is your customers, service users, collaborators, suppliers or others, your comprehensive business solution must facilitate the management of all your relationships. How do you choose?

Your platform should be able to:

Support the entire lifecycle of the relationship with your customers
Facilitate the prospecting and acquisition of new customers
Enhancing support initiatives and additional benefits

How do you find the complete business solution that will allow you to reach your goals? To achieve this, you should consider the following 5 factors:

1. Can your platform be customized to your needs?

Each broker has their own way of doing things. Consequently, your platform must reflect the broker DNA. Forcing a standard process is far from ideal. Therefore, the flexibility of your platform is an important factor. You must ensure that the platform you are considering will allow you to support your internal processes and evolve with them.

The solution must allow you to:

Manage contacts
Centralize communications with the various partners involved (customers, insurance companies, external brokers, and even internal colleagues)
Ensure flexible management of documents that are at the heart of interactions
Support processes: prospecting, bids, implementation, billing (if TPA), renewal

2. Is your solution scalable?

Your platform must be the unique benchmark for your company. Efficient and intelligent, it must allow you to easily access strategic data. However, every company evolves. And the same goes for the tools. They must be able to adjust through changes and technological advances. The scalability of your platform matters. Adopt a management tool that can be updated regularly. This will ensure that bugs are fixed, and new features are added over time at no additional cost.

Advantages of a scalable platform:

Enhanced user experience on your complete business solution
Customer experience more adapted to their expectations according to technological trends
Adding on new modules, allowing you to expand your service offering and business opportunities

3. Does your platform measure the efficiency of your business processes?

The solution should also allow you to evaluate your business performance. In fact, you must be able to count on simple and direct access to your data. Therefore, your platform must facilitate their analysis, for example by outputting reports (KPIs) on the actual state of your business. The growth of a broker business depends on the relationships with your clients. Being able to access reports allows you to manage these relationships as efficiently as possible. It is not just about serving clients; it is about serving them better.

“Turning your clients into clients for life”

Paul Graham, founder of DHL

A platform can help you to increase the efficiency of your business:

Improve the efficiency of your sales. Prioritize the opportunities that can lead you to a successful sale, based on the needs of your customer.
Access all opportunities that could lead to additional sales in existing agreements.
Track the probability of closing an opportunity. Disclosure of opportunities and other recommendations.

4. Does your solution connect to your accounting tool?

In terms of connectivity with an accounting system, an insurance management tool such as BMS (Broker Management System) may not connect with the broker accounting system. As a result, internal resources must work to link the two systems together. This represents a huge waste of time and money. Without communication between these systems, the efforts can be duplicated. For example, the finance and administration departments could process the same information, but in two completely different solutions that are not interrelated.

Tip: Looking for a complete business solution? Evaluate it first by remembering that you will need to close the billing cycle. The month is over, and you need to determine your billing cycle. Is it 5 days or 7 days? In fact, evaluating the system not only increases the productivity of the various resources, but also improves cash flow. In fact, your cycle could then be shortened.

5. Can you access your platform remotely?

Even though COVID-19 has taken over our lives and the insurance industry, the situation will eventually return to normal. Certainly, the sales module of your platform allows you to communicate now. But it also allows you to prepare your recovery plan with personalized emails. What to do in a context where it is more difficult for a broker who works remotely to build and maintain a relationship of trust and proximity with his clients? A module such as customer service is a very practical solution. It will help you easily respond to clients, whether by email or by phone.

Example of the advantages of a platform optimized for remote work: A client contacts one of your brokers because he has a question? The broker could have the necessary documents regarding the question nearby, without having to do any research. So, everything would be there, in front of him, centralized.

Take advantage of your business solution to its full potential. We help you evaluate your current system! Not sure what you can do with your platform? You do not know where to start or you want to try a new tool? Our team can analyze your business needs and propose advanced modules and customization. These could give you a good helping hand in these times of crisis and long after. Contact us for more information.