Maintaining a CRM platform that works for you—not the other way around.
Clean, complete and accurate data is the key to keeping your agency in the know of your agency’s true Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The definition of Key Performance Indicators is a quantifiable measure used to evaluate the success of an organization in meeting objectives for performance.
An agency’s KPIs provide a focus for strategic and operational improvement. They are the basis for analytical decision making and help focus attention on what matters most.
Accurate information housed in your customer relationship management (CRM) systems has the most impact on the metrics reported in your agency’s KPIs. Hence the term… “Garbage In = Garage Out”
What Is Bad Data?
To help understand the affect that bad data might be having on your business, let’s start by considering what constitutes bad data.
Bad data is defined as information that is incorrect, outdated, duplicate, improperly formatted, or completely missing from your sales and customer database. Instead of being able to rely on this data, this data could cause you to commit potential E&O errors, customer service mistakes and affect your marketing campaigns or sales interactions.
Several recent studies estimate more than 40% of company databases grow outdated yearly. The errors and inconsistencies in your CRM data make it difficult to have reliable insights and will affect your organizations operational efficiencies. Let’s not forget miscommunication to your policyholders.
A faulty database is an inefficient database which means that clean, accurate and trustworthy customer data is essential to the success of your business.
How does data become bad?
1. Human error: Customer data is inputted correctly
2. Data is formatted incorrectly with a bad conversion of the data. When combining multiple data sources, there are many opportunities for data to be duplicated or mislabeled.
3. Downloads not processed timely or not processed accurately
4. Bad Setup at the Policy or Company level in your CRM
What are the effects of bad CRM data?
We have all seen the consequences of bad data in our CRM. Ultimately, inaccurate records and poor data can result in more time and effort spent correcting the data than time spent on customer service or sales.
Now the BIG questions…how do you clean up your customer data?
1. Look for inconsistencies – Are all your carrier names, policy titles, application types, and statuses uniform? Many CRMs offer their recommendations to recognize inconsistent data
2. Purge duplicates polices and clients
3. Void AND Archive old data
4. Combine Duplicate Records – Make it a habit to search your database before you enter a new Prospect or Client
5. Identify data that you are no longer using – Often new updates or version of your CRM will make some data collection obsolete
6. Manually fill in missing data or obtain carrier downloads to flood data
7. Review important reporting data such as Current Rate, Quote Premium and Effective Dates
8. Evaluate expired policies to ensure that they are no longer active. If active, renew or reinstate accordingly
Now it is up to you to keep your data clean
How do I keep my data clean in my CRM?
1. Create standard practices around data entry – Is everyone consistent in the way to enter information on clients and prospects? Does everyone follow the same best practices to ensure consistent data?
2. Determine who can edit your data and in what way. This can usually be handled by the User Permissions in your CRM
3. Most CRMs have ‘Required Fields’. Set these requirements to align with your data collection
4. Regular scheduled and standardized data review
5. Monthly, if not more frequent, data cleansing
Five characteristics of quality data:
Accuracy: Ensure your data adheres to our agency’s values.
Completeness: Require manually entered data meets your agency requirements.
Consistency: Continually monitor that your data is consistent within the same databases.
Uniformity: All data possesses the same underlying structure.
Validity: The accuracy to which your data measures to your defined business rules.
When you trust your data quality, you have a clear understanding of your agency’s KPIs which is an important step to making efficient and effective business decisions. You can also effectively manage your book of business with time management optimization to elevate your sales performance.
Written on August 18, 2021 by Peggy Corbett Open Post
Many of the people in our industry, like industries everyone, have been displaced from their place of business and now are working from home. On top of that, many are having to juggle having their children at home, their spouse working from home and other family members or roommates doing the same.
Working from home is a challenging endeavor in the best of situations and what we find ourselves in, as a family, as a community, as a country, is far from the best of situations.
I started working from home about three years ago and it was a shock to my senses from being in an active, people filled office every day. At first, I thought ‘how wonderful’ to walk in my slippers to my home office holding my coffee cup in my pajamas. ‘How wonderful’ to be able to start a load of laundry at any time. ‘How wonderful’ to take a well-deserved break to watch my favorite TV show because didn’t I take breaks at the office? I thought to myself that I am still being very focused and feeling very productive. Then, about a week of this behavior went by and I had to honestly look at myself…I wasn’t very focused and I wasn’t very productive. The old adage of ‘squirrel’ was true. Anything would break my focus and lead me away from my desk. On the other side, I also found myself sitting at my computer until 9:30pm several times a week. There needs to be a happy medium.
So, what did I do? I already had a designated work space and I had all of the tools necessary but I needed to learn best work from home practices. I needed to set office hours and abide by them. I even began to set alarms for ‘lunch’ and ‘quitting’ time.
I learned that I needed to get up and get dressed and not sit in sweats all day. Feeling good and positive relays to keeping your mind sharp and focused.
I had to avoid distractions. I put a sign on the door to my office to let everyone in the house know that I was working and to enter at their own risk! In today’s current situation, distractions sometimes cannot be avoided as we have children at home. However, children (and other distracting members of the household) also need to learn that work time is necessary but you may have to adjust your ‘hours’ to coincide with naps and homework time.
Self-discipline is tool that needs to be learned. I found that I needed, more than ever, to actually put constraints on my time. This seems counterintuitive but time constraints can be one the most powerful forces behind ingenuity. If you are trying to create or refine a concept, give yourself a very short period of time—no more than 20-30 minutes—to generate as many ideas as possible related to a specific prompt. Then work from there.
In the home office setting, it is easy for you to become your own worst enemy. Shut off your personal email account, turn off the TV news (especially right now!), log out of your social media accounts, stick to the structure of a ‘normal’ office work day and above all else, set goals for yourself for daily tasks. Using your CRM to its full capacity is especially important right now. Make sure that you are working as efficiently as possible by fully taking advantage of the automation available to you.
Hold yourself accountable while still remembering that we are living in trying times…so also forgive yourself.
Written on April 7, 2020 by Peggy Corbett Open Post
During this challenging time, Agency Transformation is concerned for the health and well-being of both our agency partners and their employees. We know that in California, and throughout the country, many businesses, including your own, have been disrupted and have had to establish protocols to ensure that employees work remotely.
In this uncertainty, we fully realize that communication with your clients is a key factor. We have been contacted by many of our agency partners asking about the ability to send bulk emails to their clients to update them on the agency status and availability.
HawkSoft issued a very helpful email on ‘Resources to help your staff work remote and access HawkSoft’. We wanted to reiterate that HawkSoft CMS has the capability to send ‘Batch’ emails to your clients very easily. See below link to HawkSoft's 'Resources for embracing Work From Home'.
If you are not familiar with the process of Batch emails, the full instructions can be found in HawkSoft CMS Help Center > Using CMS > Correspondence > Batch Emailing. With that said, we are here to help you as well. If you need help in running a report of your clients and/or Batch emailing, we urge you to give us a call…again, we are here to help.
We offer our best wishes to you and your agency as you continue to provide your clients with the service they need. We hope that you and your families are safe during these challenging times.
Written on March 20, 2020 by Peggy Corbett Open Post
Have you taken the necessary steps to close out 2019 and welcome 2020 with the fresh start that it deserves? Closing out last year is a Must-Do step in any agency.
Get your accounts in order. One of the most important tasks at year-end is to accurately and timely close your books. Close out your account payables and receivables and balance operating and trust accounts. If you have good accounting, the process should be a pretty easy task. Closing out of your accounts and starting the year with organized and accurate balances allows you to understand your previous year’s financial activity as well as awareness to any balances that will carry forward to the new year.
Some tips from Hawksoft CMS to help you with your Year End accounting:
Understand the KPIs of your book of business from last year. By understanding the trend of your book of business from last year, you know how to move forward, what to avoid and where you gained the new business. Although you cannot change the past, it can provide insight to promote your future.
Really look at your Customer KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)
Move forward with Clean Data. This has been a hot topic in the industry. The data that you depend on in your CMS is only as good as data that YOU have put in to it. You cannot depend on your KPIs if your data is not accurate
Now, what are you going to do to Ramp-Up new sales for 2020?
Statistics tell us that the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 – 70%, while the probability of selling to a new prospect is just 5-20%. Yet, almost every agency that I work with has an average of 1.5 policies per customer. Your own customers are the best source of new business and referrals.
Run the following reports for your agency:
Start a Cross Sell campaign that fits your agency’s book of business and offer an incentive plan or a competition among your sales team members.
Studies have proved that personal lines retention rates average 95% with clients that bundle their auto and home. Whereas, retention rates are only 83% for monoline clients. Also, the same client with only one product will stay for 18 months on average. The clients with three products have an increased longevity of the 6.8 years on average. The more invested a customer is in your agency, the better your retention and longevity of clients.
Happy Holidays to you and your team. We wish you every happiness and success in the New Year!
Written on December 20, 2019 by Peggy Corbett Open Post
You work hard to bring in that perfect new client. You study their needs, you provide solutions and you write the policy that provides them the perfect protection. You send them a Welcome Letter gushing about your agency’s amazing customer service. Everything is textbook, right?
Wrong! You started out strong but like most agents, you set it and you forgot it.
Every client has specific needs in the beginning of the sales cycle but like all things in life…they change. The product and the associated coverage that you sold them today will not meet their needs of tomorrow.
You cannot sit back and wait for the client to think that the events that impact their everyday life will have an effect on their insurance coverage. This is the job of their insurance professional. The person that have entrusted and depend upon to make sure that they have the coverage when they need it for the exposures that they face today.
The first thought of the client that renovates and adds square footage to their home is not to call their insurance agent but to throw a party, inviting all of their friends, to show off the new home.
The family that has their first child does not think to call their insurance agent with an announcement of this new bundle of joy. However, their life insurance needs just drastically changed.
Ensuring your clients have adequate coverage is not the only reason to offer insurance policy reviews. For example, your client may have just put on a new roof or installed an alarm system which would qualify for a possible discount. They might have graduated college or landed their dream job which qualifies them for a new professional discount. The next agent that they talk to will surely discover the additional discounts for which they qualify. This will not only make the new agent’s premium more attractive but it will emphasize that you did not expertly do your job.
I know…you are thinking that we don’t have time! Did you know that it costs five times as much to attract a new customer than retain your existing customer? Whether you have 100 clients or 10,000 clients, every client must have an annual review.
As already highlighted, the annual review provides the much-needed review of the clients ever changing needs. It also, just as importantly, proves your agency’s value. It is crucial for building and strengthening the Agent/Client relationship and puts your agency’s ‘face with a name’ so to speak. It also increases loyalty from your clients and provides you with the perfect opportunity to offer needed advice for higher limits of coverage or additional policies.
As an agent, have you ever had a client upset with you because they had too much coverage at the time of a disastrous claim? On the flip side, I bet that you have had a client blame you for not enough or inappropriate coverage.
Systematic insurance reviews must be a part of your agency’s business model. The occurrence of these reviews and looking out for your clients’ best interest is the differentiator of your agency versus your competition. It’s up to your agency to determine if the reviews are done annually on renewal, by a systematic breakdown of the clients by alphabet or working your way through your client base by individual client premium volume. Whatever works for your agency, just remember to set it and don’t forget it.
Written on August 8, 2018 by Peggy Corbett Open Post