3 tech strategies for insurance companies as agents, brokers retire

Every insurer has agents and brokers that consistently outperform the mean. But all-stars can’t carry the whole team. A key challenge has always been leveling up the performance of less-skilled and less-experienced producers.

That challenge is about to get a lot bigger for insurers. Half the insurance workforce will retire over the next 15 years. They’ll need to get those “green” producers to proficiency quickly. And they’ll need to ensure they don’t lose existing customers as retiring producers hand off their books of business.

The key to surviving the shift will be capturing, sharing and scaling the institutional knowledge of their most experienced producers.

Technology is essential to tackling this challenge, but insurers need to ensure their tech strategies are focused on the very specific challenges and needs of less-experienced producers. 

Here are three tech-enabled strategies to help insurers face the “Silver Tsunami” head on:

1. Move from customer data to customer intelligence

New and less-experienced producers don’t have developed referral networks. They haven’t learned the tricks of the trade for prospecting. They can easily spend a lot of time spinning their wheels—trying to find prospects, figuring out how to connect, and ultimately hitting a lot of dead ends.

There’s tremendous potential to “machine the intuition” that more seasoned producers glean through experience—harnessing customer data and using analytics to focus producers on their best opportunities. Insurers are already aware of this, and that’s why more and more are implementing CRMs like Salesforce to capture and organize their customer data.

But less-experienced producers frankly don’t know what to do with raw customer data. Insurers need their CRMs to transform raw data into meaningful customer intelligence—actionable signals that every producer can understand and use.

Moreover, insurers need their CRMs to look beyond the “walls” of the organization. Customers and prospects have robust, complex lives beyond the visibility of internal data streams. A CRM only tracking internal metrics misses most of the valuable and vital signals that producers need to act effectively.

What does a “better way” look like? A CRM that’s purpose-built for the insurance industry should automatically integrate valuable external data streams—for example, credit reporting data that reveals when customers and prospects are shopping for a car or a house. A purpose-built CRM can give insurers pre-configured analytics that know how to put that broad integrated data into meaningful context for producers: what life events represent critical inflection points in the insurance buying journey, what customer behaviors signal intent, etc.

2. Leverage pre-built journeys to guide relationship-building

Alerting on customer behaviors, life events and signals of intent is a big step forward for less-experienced producers. It’s encouraging to see more insurers leveraging CRMs to deliver these insights. But tech strategies can’t stop with insights—they need to support and enable action. 

In other words, surfacing alerts that tell a producer “this is important” is great. But less-experienced producers still struggle to determine the right course of action: Should they call immediately? Email first? How quickly do they send a follow-up email? When is the prospect ready for a call?

Most CRMs now include marketing automation capabilities aimed at solving this problem. But leading generalist CRMs need to be customized to fit specific insurance buying journeys—and this is where the potential of these tools gets overwhelmed by the time, cost and complexity of customization.

By contrast, CRMs purpose-built for insurance can give producers pre-configured communication journeys on Day 1. Like giving them the accrued institutional knowledge of your most seasoned producers, these journeys are built on best practices and tailored to specific customer intelligence—from how to make that first connection, to the right cadence and channel mix to build engagement, to indicating the right time to reach out with a human touch.

3. Use automation to enable personalization at scale

The best and most experienced producers know how to identify a prospect, make a connection, build trust and close a deal. Just as importantly, they’ve learned how to do all of that at scale—efficiently juggling existing customers and prospects at different points of their journeys.

Scaling up is one of the biggest challenges for less-experienced producers. And the truth is that even the best producers are limited by what they can do with manual workflows. This is where the full value of modern CRMs really comes to life: using broader and deeper customer intelligence to automatically trigger and inform marketing campaigns or journeys.

Again, insurers can’t rely on less-experienced producers to connect the dots—which life events and intent signals trigger which actions or journeys. But insurers can shortcut around the headache of customizing a generalist CRM platform. By deploying a CRM that comes fully baked with insurance-specific capabilities, insurers get analytics tools engineered to look for the customer intelligence insights that matter to the insurance buying journey and pre-configured journeys with the built-in triggers to make the most of that high-impact customer intel.

This kind of purpose-built platform lets a less-experienced recruiter effectively scale their personalized connections at every stage of the customer relationship. They can manage a larger prospect pipeline. They can reach out to existing customers when they hit an important life event or stage (renewal, buying a new house, having another kid, etc.). They can even leverage always-on nurture campaigns to maintain consistent engagement with every customer in book of business, using customer intelligence to send helpful, relevant information (i.e., financial wellness, tips for navigating financial goals) that builds trust and maintains loyalty.

The retirement wave will accelerate digital transformation

Baby boomers have had an outsized impact on the insurance industry since they boomed onto the scene post-WWII—and they’re not done changing our business yet. The oncoming Silver Tsunami presents a make-or-break moment for digital transformation in the insurance world. 

Insurers need to accelerate their digital innovation roadmaps or experience a “retirement brain drain” that will be hard to recover from. But critically, this digital acceleration needs to be focused on the needs of producers: Generic technology isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution; insurers need to empower producers with purpose-built tools that give them meaningful insights and drive effective action, so they can focus on what they do best: Making genuine personal connections.