The Benefit of CRMs

The right technology can make or break a company in today's fast-paced business world. But how do you know which services are worth the investment? When it comes to the world of insurance, CRM — customer relationship management — software can provide a massive range of benefits.

From streamlining your customer service to providing detailed insights, a CRM offers a wide range of advantages that will allow you to focus your time and energy on more critical tasks. Read on to learn more about this type of software and four ways it can benefit your workflow.

But First…What Is a CRM?

Before diving into the benefits, let’s briefly explore customer relationship management (CRM) software. This technology, offered as a tool by many firms, can be used in many aspects of business: management, sales, individual agent relationships, and beyond. A CRM platform will have numerous dashboards and systems to allow you to organize internal and external workflows.

For insurance agencies, a CRM can serve as a central system to keep track of client information; track the lifecycle of pitches and sales; manage email marketing; record communications with external supplies; and more. By understanding the many ways that this technology can apply to your daily work, you’ll create efficiencies that will grow your business over time. With that said, here are four of the top benefits that come with implementing a CRM.

Benefit 1: Improve Your Customer Service

Say goodbye to disorganized customer information. With a CRM, customers’ data will be stored in a single central hub, no matter how spread out your agency is or how customer data is obtained (i.e., if you have many different producers capturing their own clients’ information).

This makes generating email lists or SMS blasts much easier, as you won’t have to spend time chasing down updated information from different segments of the company. You’ll also be able to add tags or notes about the customers’ interests and organize the data based on various filters (like demographics or products purchased). You can even set up automatic customer service responses based on specific groupings.

Benefit 2: Find New Leads

As an insurance agent, a key component of your daily workflow is finding and following up on leads. With a CRM, you can both organize and optimize your lead outreach. Leads can be automatically pulled into a database from different online sectors (i.e., website interest or social media), and their journey will be designed via established frameworks in the CRM.

For example, the CRM can automatically send out messages on your behalf and alert you when it’s time to nudge a prospective client. As leads become more interested in your products and services, you’ll be able to spend valuable time interacting with those who are more likely to convert into a customer rather than wasting time on wide-ranging early leads.

Benefit 3: Easily Generate Insights

As the lead-to-customer pipeline unfolds within your CRM, data will automatically be gathered into a central dashboard. This means that insight reports are right at your fingertips — and rather than crunching the number yourself, the CRM will be able to do it for you.

Whether you want to analyze the growth of a geographic region of customers from a specific quarter, or look at sales of a specific product over a year, a flexible CRM dashboard makes it simple for anyone in the company to access necessary information. This saves a considerable amount of time across departments as well, since you’ll no longer have to wait on reports when all the data is centralized.

Benefit 4: Save Time with Automation

As noted through all the benefits listed above, automation is a key component of CRM platforms. Beyond these benefits, automation is at the core of what a CRM can bring to a company; it allows hundreds of small yet time-consuming tasks to disappear from an employee’s workload.

Email marketing, for instance, is a core selling point of many CRMs, as automation can allow for endless drip campaigns. But smaller things like assigning producers to new clients, alerts regarding a customer’s product journey, or automated data entry are all components of a competent CRM. As you customize its tools to your business, you’ll undoubtedly find new and specific ways to cut costs and save employee time.