In the insurance industry, customer service is especially important. If you break trust with your customers, or if they feel confused about their insurance policies, you could easily lose your customers to top rivals in your field.
So what does it take to properly educate, inform, and support your insurance customers?
Keys to Customer Service Success in the Insurance Industry
These are some of the most important strategies for success in the customer service department of an insurance company:
- Put the customer first. It should go without saying, but put your customers first. Due to the strict nature of insurance policies and a variety of laws and regulations, you won’t be able to fulfill every customer’s request or make every customer happy, but you can always consider their thoughts, feelings, and relationships to the brand. Design your customer service strategy around your customers.
- Establish high-level values and processes. Start at the high level and try to establish your business’s customer service values, philosophies, and core processes. Are you trying to resolve issues as quickly as possible? Are you more focused on making sure every customer leaves feeling better about your business? What’s the smoothest way to handle incoming inquiries? You don’t need to fill in all the details, but you should have a general map in place before proceeding.
- Provide resources for FAQs. Your customers will likely have tons of simple questions, like “is North Carolina a fault state?” It doesn’t make sense to tie up your phone lines with these easy inquiries, so consider putting together some resources that customers can use to help themselves and answer their own questions. The more robust and easily accessible your knowledge bases are, the quicker your customers will be able to find answers without direct assistance. Make sure all your customers know about the existence of these resources.
- Offer multiple channels of support. People strongly differ in terms of communication preferences. Some people exclusively want to help themselves. Some people want to talk to customer service agents directly. Others prefer to email, or even reach out on social media (especially if you have a strong profile in place). To serve the largest number of people, and facilitate greater efficiency, it’s a good idea to offer many different channels of support.
- Establish a direct line to a human being for those who need it. Nearly half your customersprefer working with a human being, rather than a chatbot or an automated system. While automation, AI, and more self-help options for customers have saved money and improved convenience in this space, it’s not a good idea to completely abandon your human customer service agents. Make sure there are direct lines available to human beings for those who need or want them.
- Harness the power of technology. Internally, make sure you have a good customer service software platform in place. This critical piece of technology gives your customer service agents access to the knowledge and resources they need when they need it, and helps your entire organization stay better organized.
- Provide thorough education and training for your staff. Insurance can be complicated, so make sure to provide thorough education and training for all your staff. Each customer service representative should have enough baseline insurance knowledge to handle most inquiries and help most customers. Aside from that, it’s important to train your representatives in the fundamentals of customer service.
- Actively listen. Active listening resolves many issues by itself. Some customers, especially frustrated ones, simply want to be heard. Additionally, customer service agents who actively listen are much more likely to fully understand the problem before they attempt to resolve it.
- Respond with empathy.Empathy is a powerful tool that can help you connect with people and better understand them. At times, the insurance industry can feel cold and alienating; if you can give your customers genuine empathy when they call in, you’ll stand apart in the industry and make your customers much happier.
- Learn from your mistakes. Finally, make it a point to learn from your mistakes. Even with all these strategies in place, you’ll likely have some customer issues that you cannot resolve and some customers that have poor customer service experiences. Each of these failures is an opportunity to conduct a root cause analysis and figure out what went wrong so you can prevent the issue from recurring in the future.
Getting Feedback
It’s also important to get feedback, from as many people as possible, at regular intervals. Short surveys can help you gauge the sentiments of your customers, while internal meetings and discussions can help you learn from your staff members. Use these insights to fuel new innovations, new processes, and ultimately, better customer service strategies.