Helping Agents Keep Pace with Customer Expectations

Expectations among insurance customers have escalated dramatically in the past decade. With the ability to shop for and access insurance services-as well as just about every other product and service-whenever and wherever they choose, today's insurance customers now expect their local insurance agents to offer the same level of convenience and responsiveness provided by call centers and Web sites. As a result, agents need new capabilities to keep pace with their customers' busy and digital lifestyles. Fortunately, many of the technologies that Internet and call center channels have been using over the past several years have become cost-effective to implement in the agent channel. With these technologies, agents not only can improve the service they provide at costs that make sense for their businesses, but they can also use the same technologies to help them anticipate their customers' needs and proactively market policies and services to meet those needs.

Customer relationship management (CRM) solutions enable call centers to hold consistent and valuable interactions with their customers through the 360-degree view of customers that they provide. In the past, providing the agent channel with these same solutions presented insurers and brokers with cost and security challenges. But with the advent of low-cost broadband, rich Internet applications, and improved security and rights management technologies, carriers can now make CRM tools available to their agent networks in a very cost-efficient manner.

For years, call centers have also taken advantage of technology to aggregate the myriad legacy insurance systems into single, intuitive portals or applications used by telephone customer service representatives. These single views of the customer, pulled from disparate legacy systems, have streamlined interactions with customers while boosting productivity and lowering costs. Now, with the broader availability of similar applications and portals and new security technologies, agents can be equipped with these same capabilities so that they, too, can provide an enhanced and more efficient customer experience.

Agents still retain a clear advantage when it comes to selling and servicing complex insurance products, whether personal or commercial offerings. However, Internet and call center channels are encroaching on this advantage with tools and services that provide customers with online guidance and technologies that enable more complex consultations with call center representatives. To maintain relevance in this changing environment, agents must better leverage their relationships to cross-sell and up-sell, increasing their sales and service efficiency and their knowledge of complex products. Doing so means taking advantage of CRM solutions as well as technologies that provide timely, online knowledge management tools and training, all of which have fallen in price and are now cost-effective for the agent channel.

Perhaps one of the most difficult areas for agents to address in meeting customer expectations has been service hours. Matching the often 24/7 hours of operation offered by Internet and call center channels has been a costly and unappealing proposition for most agents. However, with the steep price declines and simultaneous performance increases offered by mobile applications and mobile Web browsers, these solutions are now an efficient way to deliver advanced, real-time sales and service consultations-with secure access to customer data-whenever and wherever agents choose to do business. This means that agencies can expand their hours of customer service while at the same time giving employees the added benefit of more flexibility to choose where and when they work.

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With the economical, security-enhanced technologies available today, agents can be equipped with tools not only to meet, but to exceed their customers' expectations and needs. Solutions such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Microsoft Customer Care Framework (CCF), Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Windows Mobile 6.1, Windows Vista, and Microsoft Silverlight empower agents with integrated, easy-to-use sales and service tools that provide a range of capabilities, including:

Learn more by reading about our agent/broker services solutions for the insurance industry, and about the Microsoft Insurance Value Chain (IVC), a comprehensive approach based on Microsoft technologies that enables Microsoft's large partner ecosystem to develop a streamlined set of integrated applications and workflows.

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