Improve Insurance Agency Channel Performance

India is a large country with a population of around 1.39 billion people. Insurance companies can achieve growth in revenues only from coverage across maximum towns, cities, and villages of India. Deploying such a large internal sales team is unfeasible. Insurance companies achieve this through their agency channels and this channel will become the most critical channel for them.

Competition in the Industry

The competition in the market is fierce when we talk about agencies. This is not just because of a mature market but also due to the rise of digital distribution platforms capturing significant share in the more advanced urban markets. To compete head-on with the coming growth of the competitive insurance channels, independent and carrier agents can build up and expand on their capabilities.

Agents who provide tailored guidance and advocacy to customers when it's needed are the agency channel's bright spot and future. People want certainty, they want to be sure that they can trust a company/advocate in the time of need. Especially after witnessing a worldwide pandemic and going through such uncertain times, people have now more than ever started to invest in life and health insurance. A sense of security is achieved when people invest in life insurance.

In the insurance business, which has indisputably the highest-touch and highest-volume requirement for interactions by its sales professionals, the issue for the agency channel is developing a velocity of contact with current and prospective policyholders. All this implies that improving your agency channel performance can give huge rewards to company topline and margins.

Strategies to Improve Performance

Improving strategy in the field will lead to improved performance and better results. Investing in the client experience is one of the cornerstones of being active and profitable in the insurance sector. There are multiple ways for you to improve performance. Pay attention to what strategy would work best for the agency to target the right audience and achieve goals. Some of the strategies that can be useful include:

1. Cash Incentive

Cash incentives are one strategy, with clear daily communication on how agents are performing and what they're getting paid, an improvement in the performance of the agents can be noticed. Short-term goals for firms, such as raising productivity or lowering harmful behaviours, are frequently achieved through cash incentives. It does not necessitate personalization–everyone is compensated, and nearly everyone would like to be compensated more. This also helps in creating an atmosphere where people are willing to work hard and motivates your agents.

2. Gamification of Performance

This is a relatively new concept where employees are a part of many games that have scores, virtual badges are also there to add a sense of fun into the work environment. This strategy would work more for the young workforce of the country. Games do not just add a sense of fun and curiosity to the workplace but also help develop a sense of enthusiasm.

Gamification helps improve the engagement level of the employees. Employees in a gamified workplace are constantly updated on their performance as they acquire better ranks and badges that attract the attention of coworkers and managers. One of the most important advantages of gamifying companies is that it aids in the identification of future stars and leaders. Gamification gives tools for driven workers to participate and be re-engaged, rather than just motivating the disengaged.

3. Recognition through Social Validation

In a generation that lives on social media, social validation has become of utmost importance. This would be the third strategy that would work very well in bringing out the desired results. Today’s generation responds very well to the recognition earned through social validation.

4. Create a Marketing Plan

If you are just sitting on your desk waiting for people to reach out to you, don’t. No matter how brilliant your product/service is, it is going to take some effort from your side to make it work, to get people to invest. Creating a marketing plan would involve you doing thorough research on how trends are right now in the marketplace. After this, you would need to know how you should execute your ideas to catch the attention of the audience. Marketing requires effort and you have to be 100% involved in the process.

5. Simplify the Experience

Being available for the customers in any and every way is important. Staying in office at all times seems a bit extreme, but with the growth of technological advancements, you don’t need to do that. The efforts you put in to simplify the user experience and make things easier for them will have an impact on the people.

Conclusion

Incentivate is a sales and channel engagement platform that can enable incentives, contests, and gamification as well as enable social validation for your agency channels. Get in touch with us now!