Nothing impacts your agency’s health like customer retention rates. Even with new clients rolling in, you still need to have a strategy for keeping current customers if you want your book of business to grow. The good news is that retaining clients is much easier and more cost-effective than finding new ones, especially if you have a well-thought-out retention plan. In this blog, we’ll go over the main areas you’ll need to focus on to build the most effective retention strategy for your business.

Your insurance agency’s retention strategy should encompass important tasks across your business, including:

• Handling client retention tasks efficiently to touch 100% of renewals

• Maintaining client relationships all year long

• Using tools that identify cross-sell opportunities

• Providing excellent customer service

• Tracking client retention goals

Honing In on Retention Strategy

Now that you know which areas to focus on to improve retention rates, let’s take a closer look at the tactics you can use in each category to maximize retention.

Handling client retention tasks efficiently to touch 100% of renewals

Completing every retention task manually would take a lot of time and energy that most agencies don’t have. Using software to handle insurance customer retention enables you to complete these tasks much more efficiently and makes it easier to keep track of the small retention details. Retention Center® is one patented tool that easily helps you touch 100% of renewals to ensure that none slip through the cracks. Retention Center also enables you to identify at-risk renewals. It generates a summary of premium-bearing changes between an insured’s current and future policies so that you have all the information you need to remarket right at your fingertips.

Maintaining client relationships all year long

When it’s time for renewals, you want to have firmly established customer relationships. Policyholders who feel a connection to your agency are much more likely to stick around. Regularly sent emails and follow-ups can help you build customer loyalty by reassuring clients that they’re a priority for you all year round. To do this, you’ll need to have software that helps you send these messages on special dates like birthdays or anniversaries, as well as during renewal time. Text messaging can also help you reach out to insurance clients and get faster responses. Many consumers are more comfortable using text as a touchpoint than email, and the response rate is higher, making SMS a win-win for you and your clients.

Using tools that identify cross-sell opportunities

When customers use your agency for multiple types of insurance, they’re more likely to renew. This means that if you can identify cross-selling opportunities, you can boost revenue in the short term and keep it up with increased long-term retention. Software that sorts through your agency data and book of business to identify potential cross-sells is critical to this aspect of your retention strategy since it’s so labor-intensive and time-consuming to manually sort for these opportunities.

Providing excellent customer service

Insurance clients who are satisfied with your agency’s service are much more likely to respond positively at renewal time, which is why providing a stellar customer experience that keeps insureds happy is integral to your retention strategy. The easiest way to guarantee customer satisfaction with your services without breaking the bank or overwhelming your insurance agents with extra tasks is to implement customer service software. EZLynx Client Center™ is an online self-service portal that lets your clients access their insurance policy documents and ID cards 24/7 on any device. Client Center also lets your insureds print and share confidential documents securely and request policy changes online. Quick, convenient online service allows you to meet customer expectations and helps your agents minimize time spent dealing with in-person client requests – a win-win.

Tracking client retention goals

It’s not always immediately clear if your retention strategy is working. When your agency uses analytics software to sift through the data in your book of business, you can more easily and quickly identify retention patterns as well as sales data regarding new policies. If the data shows that your retention strategy is working, you can quickly double down on the tactics that have the greatest positive impact to increase renewals even more. But, if your metrics show that your strategy isn’t going as well as you’d hoped, you can immediately change direction and start identifying a new plan to increase retention rates.

Design Your Retention Strategy

We hope this post has been useful to you as you build your customer retention strategy. It’s important to remember that there’s no single area of agency operations that determines retention success. An effective strategy involves providing excellent service and client outreach year-round, as well as having the ability to touch 100% of renewals and analyze data for patterns and cross-sell opportunities. To get the best results in each area, you’ll need to implement software that helps you quickly and efficiently complete each retention task. For more information on designing an effective retention strategy and identifying the insurtech that will help you execute that strategy, check out our How to Maximize Retention: An EZGuide eBook.