There are many aspects to winning insurance clients and providing good customer service. However, a consistent customer experience has the highest effect on making clients happy. This is not only due to knowing what to expect but reduces potential errors and increases efficiencies. In this article, we will explore three reasons why consistency is important to a positive customer experience.
First, let’s start with the most obvious reason why consistency is important. A consistent customer experience allows the client to feel a level of comfort in knowing what to expect when they contact your agency or engage with you in anyway whether it is online, on the phone, in person, or in any other type of communication. Because most of our clients engage with their insurance agents only occasionally it can be nerve racking to contact you simply due to the unknown. Therefore, the more consistent we are when we interact with our customers, the less unknown there is for them to contact us. It can also reduce anxiety when having to deal with multiple employees on a single issue or transitioning a client to a new account manager when one leaves.
The second benefit to a consistent process is reduction of errors. When we are all being trained the same way, we eliminate individual thought from entering how we should handle a situation. While we expect our staff to have a high level of decision making ability when it is warranted, there is no need to apply decision making to standard procedures. By having everyone follow the same process, there is less of a chance that someone will make a bad decision.
Additionally, they can help each other out by answering questions and can also take over tasks mid-process when someone is sick or unavailable for any reason.
We can demonstrate the importance of all three of these pieces at once by using an example of a client calling in at the end of the day on an issue that is going to take overnight to solve. In both scenarios, the employee that took the original call is unexpectedly out the following day.
- Scenario 1 – No consistent process
- First, the insurance client is going to feel anxious. They will probably also be annoyed because they are going to have to review all of the details over again. They may be even further annoyed if they were told one thing by the first agent and are now being told something else by the second. From a potential error standpoint, the second agent may assume that something had already been done because that is the way that they do it. If the first agent typically does that later in the process, this step may get skipped. Finally, from an efficiency standpoint, we are easily doubling up work. Most likely, agent number two is starting over the process from scratch to handle it their way. So, all of the effort from the first agent has been wasted.
- Scenario 2 – Consistent process
- While the insurance client will probably feel a little anxiety to start, that is quickly going to dissipate as they realize that they don’t have to repeat themselves and that agent two is quickly picking up the ball where it was left off. In fact, they will probably be even more impressed than if the same agent from the day before had been in that day. Next, errors are less likely to be made because the steps are clear so regardless of who is performing them, each task will be performed the same therefore eliminating potential missed items. Finally, since the second employee is simply taking over where the first one left off, the effort the first employee put in has paid off making the overall process simple and efficient.
There are many areas where we can create a consistent customer experience. These include the full timeline of a client, from initial contact, through the sales process, becoming a client, and finally potentially leaving the agency. In next month’s Customer Experience blog, we will take at these four components of a client timeline and how we can use a consistent customer experience to increase both sales and retention.
Be sure to contact us to learn more about how consistency works into our Customer Experience AppX program.
