The right tools and systems are essential to effectively managing an insurance agency. Insurance is all about customer relationships, so investing in insurance tech to help you better manage prospects and clients across the insurance lifecycle makes sense. Two common tools that come to mind are a customer relationship management (CRM) system and an agency management system (AMS). While both systems can help insurance agents manage their businesses, prospects, and customers more easily, they ultimately serve different purposes.

What Is Insurance CRM Software?

An insurance CRM system is software used to manage, track and organize an insurance agency’s customer relationships and respond to customers’ needs. Its capabilities include lead generation, customer interaction management, and sales and marketing task automation.

It centrally stores customer information, including contact and policy details and agency interaction history. CRM insurance software can help agents track sales, identify cross-sell opportunities, and measure marketing campaign effectiveness.

What Is an Agency Management System?

An insurance AMS is a comprehensive agency management solution that goes beyond customer-related sales tasks. Management systems give insurance agencies the tools to handle the complete customer lifecycle. This includes delivering enhanced customer service and communication that meets customer expectations, automating and streamlining processes, retaining customers, winning new business, and using data to help improve operations.

The best systems have intuitive tools for agency management, automation, retention, commercial submissions, eSignature, email marketing, text messaging, client self-service, payments, reporting/analytics, and more. Designed to integrate with carrier systems, agency management systems streamline daily tasks with automated workflows and allow agents to easily access customer quotes, policies, claims, and other documents all in one place.

What Are the Key Differences Between an Insurance CRM and AMS?

Insurance CRM

Insurance AMS

Is a CRM or AMS Better for Running an Independent Insurance Agency?

While CRM software and insurance AMS are great tools to help agents better manage their businesses, they have different purposes. CRM systems improve sales and enhance customer relationships.  

Agency management systems are used to run the entire business. Your AMS can include all the tools found in a standard CRM solution and offer additional customer relationship management tools not found in CRM software. What sets your AMS apart from your CRM system is that it includes every tool you need to run your business, including, but not limited to, customer relationship management software.

Insurance agencies need CRM systems to:

• Easily access data: Storing customer data is the most critical function your CRM platform can offer. When you have a single place to access all your client information, you can easily spot more sales opportunities, remarket during renewal time, and reach out to insureds with information about their policies.

• Forecast sale: Use your sales CRM solution to estimate the value of each potential deal. As a sale moves through your pipeline, your software should give you an increasingly accurate number. Use forecasts to ensure producers stay on track to hit target sales goals so that you can maximize revenue

• Track and manage sales activities: With CRM tools, you can get more out of your agency data. You’ll be able to use customer data already in your system to identify more prospects and track opportunities through the sales pipeline. Leverage data to round accounts, service existing customers, and increase new business

• Quickly visualize the close ratios, deal aging, and producer success: CRM dashboards show you where you stand at each stage of the sales process. Use them to quickly pull up producers’ close ratios and deal aging, and get a view of the entire sales process to make informed decisions.

• Provide insights needed to recapture, win and cross-sell before the X-Date: Data mining doesn’t just help you monitor the sales process. Spot opportunities to recapture, win, and cross-sell using your customer information in your CRM system.

Insurance agencies need an ams to:

• Offer exceptional customer service: Your AMS should offer an online client service portal. With a client portal, your agency can increase customer satisfaction by providing 24/7 customer support to insureds every day of the week. Insureds can access policy docs, print ID cards, and make change requests, all online without an agent present and in real time. Client portals help you build a reputation for offering an excellent customer experience and reduce the hours agents spend answering customer requests over the phone—a win-win!

• Increase customer retention: Retention features within your AMS help you maximize renewals, which is crucial to maintaining your customer base and growing your agency. EZLynx® Retention Center® within EZLynx Management System™ is the only patented retention solution currently on the market. It enhances the client-agency relationship and maximizes retention by allowing agents to reach out to 100% of renewals using automation. Retention Center also identifies at-risk renewals and generates summaries of premium pricing changes so that agents have the information to follow up with customers who need special attention during renewal time.

• Improve customer communication: Communication software in your agency management system helps you build the customer relationship. Software for sending tailored, personal messages like birthday wishes or renewal reminders makes clients feel like they’re top of mind. Targeted bulk email campaigns help keep you in communication with customers outside of special dates. SMS capabilities for text notifications are also helpful for keeping in touch with insureds, allowing you to meet them on their phones, where many clients are most comfortable.

• Manage all lines of business in a single application: Your AMS should be a single system from which you can access and manage new applications, quotes and proposals, and complete ACORD forms and certificates. Your management platform minimizes the need to manage hard copies of documents by saving files within the software and eliminates the annoyance of rekeying data into different software tools.

• Improve efficiency by automating processes: Implementing automation agency-wide can make task management and completion easier and faster at every level of operations. You can set up intelligent workflow automation to handle repetitive agency assignments. Although automation isn’t CRM software, it can be a powerful addition to your CRM tools by helping you reach more customers with preset email sends, personalized messages, sales automation for reaching out to prospects, and renewal reminders.

• Provide insights for data-driven decision-making: Software in your AMS that gives you a view of your agency’s metrics can help you track how your business is doing. With a monthly data report, you can see trends for your agency’s growth. You can even compare your agency’s stats to other agencies’ stats to ensure you’re keeping up with (and surpassing) the competition.

Key Takeaways

A standalone CRM system will provide you with the core technology to store customer data and use it to find prospects and close deals. An AMS gives you additional customer relationship management software for communication, client service, and retention, as well as non-CRM capabilities for handling the entire customer lifecycle, improving efficiency, and tracking agency metrics. In other words, while basic CRM software is incredibly valuable and necessary for sales, your AMS helps you manage your customer relationships at a higher level with communication and client service tools PLUS general tools for running your agency.

Ready to Make Your Management System Your Most Productive Employee?

Discover EZLynx®.

EZLynx, the industry’s fastest-growing agency management system, has everything you need to drive the best business results. Built for the startup and growing agency, EZLynx is an easy-to-use, all-in-one AMS that accelerates growth, prioritizes retention, and streamlines your agency’s workflows. Unlike other management systems that provide disparate, incomplete, or overly complicated solutions, EZLynx has everything you need to manage clients through the complete insurance customer lifecycle.

If you would like to learn more, chat with us to schedule an appointment.