Building a Competent Customer Communication: The Role of CRM in Insurance

When you are operating a successful business, coping with a huge customer base using simplistic tools like Google spreadsheets can be extremely time-consuming. Therefore, in modern realities, few companies can do without CRM. The problem is that not every product in this niche can satisfy all the requirements of a specific company.

The way out in such a situation would be creating a custom CRM. Below we are going to discuss in which cases this is not a whim, but a necessity, as well as how such solutions are created, in our article.

Top CMS for Insurance: Ready Solutions

Перед тем, как мы расскажем, how to develop CRM for insurance, давайте ознакомимся с пятью top CRMs for insurance companies. Вот они:

Before we delve into a discussion on how to develop CRM for insurance, let us briefly review the disadvantages of the five top CRMs for insurance companies:

• Zoho;
• Sugar CRM;
• Nexj;
• Insure.io;
• Vanillasoft.

These solutions are really popular, however, they are not without some drawbacks.

So, in the case of Zoho, users complain about the lack of features for claims processing. Sugar CRM customers criticize the complexity of navigation and problems in using the calendar. Those who chose Nexj grumble about problems with splitting up households. Insure.io is not suitable for those involved in health or real estate insurance – this solution was created exclusively for life insurance. In turn, Vanillasoft was not designed to work with documentation.

Therefore, in some cases, the custom development of CRM is the only way to cover all the needs of a specific insurance business.

What Are the Reasons to Choose the CRM of Custom Design?

There are several reasons why the development of custom CRM is much more rational than choosing a ready-made solution.

Availability of features, important for a particular business

The major role of CRM in insurance is to provide the simplest interaction with customers through automation. Surely you understand that ready solutions strive to be as universal as possible to widen their target audience. Thus, such software cannot possibly take into account all the tiniest specifics of each separate business. Additionally, it would contain redundant features, unimportant for your company that, however, may complicate the work with really necessary functionality.

Custom solutions, on the other hand, are created upon the careful analysis of all the business processes and requirements of a specific company. In this case, you can think of any opportunities for the created software and provide end-to-end automation for all your business processes.

Wide integration capabilities

Unfortunately, only a few existing CRM solutions have possibilities for integration with third-party software and services. Of course, you can find a solution that can connect to some software that you use in your business processes but, most probably, not all of it.

In the case of custom CRMs, you can order absolutely any integration and it will be implemented.

This approach will allow synchronizing most if not all of the programs and services employed by your enterprise thus optimizing the execution of tasks.

Flexibility and scalability

As your business grows, you may feel the need to upgrade the capabilities of your CRM. In the case of off-the-shelf CRMs, scaling can be quite problematic, and sometimes even completely impossible.

If you choose custom CRM development from the very beginning, the team that created it will provide opportunities for further scaling and help to quickly update the set of features following the new requirements.

CRM from Scratch: Mandatory Functions

Even though individually crafted CRM for an insurance company can include any features, there is a list of functions that should be present in any custom solution by default.

Customer profiles

This is what CRMs were created for. The customer profile contains all the data relative to a particular client and also helps to trace the entire history of cooperation with them.

This data optimizes the experience of interacting with customers and allows enhancing their loyalty. Also, if there is a need to transfer the customer from one insurance agent to another, this will not be a problem, because the profile contains everything that is needed to bring the newly assigned employee up to date.

Fee calculator

Using the fee calculator, your employees can compute risk rates and insurance fees even for the most complex cases with little effort.

This is a very convenient feature for companies that provide express insurance services.

Customer reminders

It is almost impossible to remember the insurance renovation term for each customer. Most often, the clients themselves forget about these terms. But if your CRM has a reminder functionality (for example, in the form of push notifications), it will notify your customers about all the applied events and deadlines beforehand.

Scheduler

The scheduler is what helps your employees to plan their work and manage current tasks: meetings with clients and work conferences, documentation submission deadlines, etc.

It is very convenient to have this tool not in the form of a separate stand-alone application for each employee, but as a centralized access module integrated into the CMS. Then you will no longer need to coordinate upcoming events with each of your subordinates.

Analytics and reporting

Custom reports will help you understand the direction your business is heading for and whether it’s time to optimize the performance of certain departments or individual employees.

So, using a well-designed reporting panel, you can easily observe the dynamics of sales at certain time intervals, track which customers are most interested in your company’s services, or understand at which stage of the sales funnel the largest number of customers decline.

Integration with email and instant messengers

Few of us today can do without using social networks and instant messengers for work purposes. That is why it is so important to have a way to cover all aspects of the interaction between employees and customers of your insurance business.

In turn, integration with messaging systems will help you not to lose sight of a single moment of business interaction during working hours.

File sharing

The speed of information exchange is critical in the conditions of such a highly competitive and quickly changing market as insurance services. Having a good file hosting at hand, you save a lot of time for your staff. In turn, employees get the opportunity to reliably post information and create a convenient archive for all the working documentation.

The advantages of the file sharing service built-into CRM are obvious:

• The ability to conveniently and quickly share files;
• Lack of advertising and need to wait for confirmation of necessary operations;
• Safe and secure file hosting and retrieval.

All these advantages form an incredible convenience for your subordinates and guarantee the safety of internal corporate data.

Mobile client

With the advent of smartphones and tablets, more and more employees (especially those that work in the field like insurance agents) prefer operating using these devices which are more portable and can last much longer than laptops. Wherever a staff member may be, they should be able to access the corporate resources freely to work efficiently.

Despite the convenience the physical size of the wearable gadget’s screen, whether it is a tablet or smartphone, is quite small. Therefore, an application that looks great on a computer or laptop and is comfortable to use on widescreen monitors can get very garbled when viewed from a mobile device. That’s why to ensure the smooth experience for mobile users, it is crucial to provide a respective client for your CRM.

Since such development implies the creation of separate applications for respective mobile platforms (involving the specialized programming languages, such as Kotlin or Swift), this means that in addition to the main CRM’s budget, you will also need to allocate a separate budget for each mobile platform’s version or hybrid/cross-platform app that can be launched on every assumed mobile platform.

What Other Functionality Can be Useful?

Вышеприведенный список фич должен содержаться в любой кастомной CRM for insurance. Если же говорить о более объемном списке фич, которые вы можете загадать девелоперам, who will create CRM for insurance, в него можно включить следующее.

The above list of features is characteristic of any custom CRM. If we talk about a larger list of features, you may want to request the following when contracting the development company to create CRM for insurance:

Third-party software integration

As we mentioned earlier, the main advantage of customly designed CRM is the ability to provide integration with those third-party applications that you use in your work processes.

Certainly, for each company this will be their own set of integrations and, accordingly, the time for implementation will also be different. Therefore, to indicate something concrete here is impossible.

Call center

If your company often makes business calls, it makes sense to integrate call center functionality into the created CRM. Usually, it includes the ability to make calls directly from the application (for example, this feature may be present in customer profiles) and record calls (to track the quality of employee work).

Customer prioritization

Since the daily time devoted to processing new potential customers is limited, it is very important to have a tool that can independently compile a list of existing and potential clients, prioritizing those that can bring the greatest benefit to the company in the long run.

Sorting can be carried according to several parameters, for example, by age, geographical location, level of official income, the presence of chronic and difficult diseases (which is important for companies involved in health insurance), owned movable and real estate, banking assets, etc.

Chatbots

A chatbot is a kind of virtual interlocutor who plays the role of assistant consultant. It uses text or voice messages, which allows establishing a connection between the business and potential customers without resorting to hiring numerous staff. Chatbots imitate the behavior of live persons and are used to improve the quality of customer service. This is a very relevant feature for companies with a limited number of call center operators.

There are two types of chatbots:

• Simple ones, that can carry out a strictly limited set of commands, for example, operate on a base of a menu with options for services, etc.;
• Complex machine learning-based ones, which can “understand” the speech of your customers and can communicate out of bounds of strictly defined patterns. Such chatbots recognize text and voice commands and can perceive unclearly worded requests.

How Much Does the Custom CRM Development Cost?

Based on our experience, the development of the most primitive version of CRM costs our customers at least $50,000 (without a mobile client). The budget of the most pumped options can be tens of times more.
The total cost of the project depends on the developers’ hourly rate. Therefore, in many cases, it makes sense to look for outsourcing companies that develop insurance CRM software. The most popular currently are Eastern European countries – this is where the balance between price and quality is the most rational in most cases.