Daily sales & marketing tips for insurance professionals

My wife and I insure our cars and home with Safeco (which, as it happens, is now teamed up with the awesome Liberty Mutual) and we bought our combo policy through The Denver Agency, a well established and respected independent agency located in, you guessed it, Denver, Colorado.

When we decided to consolidate our home and auto policies last year (we had been insuring our cars direct with Progressive), our agent was incredibly helpful and responsive, and the process went smoothly.

Point for The Denver Agency.

However, where The Denver Agency comes up short, and I’m looking at this as both a client and a student of marketing and customer service, is in conveying the sense that they care about me. To be sure, every time I call or email, I get excellent and attentive service. But the rest of the time there is … silence. No communication whatsoever.

For some consumers, this is just how they want it: forget the boring newsletters and mail-merged holiday cards, they say, just get me covered and leave me alone.

While I can understand this point of view, I think it’s risky for agencies to assume that it is widespread. I would venture that most consumers want to have some kind of regular interaction with their agent or agency, even if it’s as simple as a yearly email asking if there’s anything they can do. Such touch points reinforce the relationship, and they give people a reason to stay.

Without any communication, consumers are left to wonder if the agency takes their business for granted, and such thoughts, needless to say, prevent any kind of loyalty from developing. My experience is case in point: to put it bluntly, inertia is perhaps the only thing keeping my wife and I with the Denver Agency, and while inertia is a powerful thing, it’s not something a business should bank on.

Earlier this year, J.D. Powers’ surveyed independent agents, asking them to rate their satisfaction with their insurers. The survey results revealed that “agent satisfaction typically increases the more often agents interact with the business contact from their insurance company. Agents prefer to receive business contacts via phone or e-mail at least once or twice a month.”

As a matter of fact, independent agents value their relationships with their carriers more than their compensation.

Consumers are the same as agents. We all want to feel valued, connected. Regular touches can create this feeling, generating satisfaction and loyalty in the process.

Most agents have no qualms about asking a client for a referral, but what about asking for a friendly Yelp? Depending on where you do business, the latter might be more lucrative.

Yelp.com is web site where people can post and read reviews of local businesses, from unruly dive bars to starched CPAs. Since starting in San Francisco and few years ago, the site has grown exponentially, gathering adherents in every major city in the country, and even one across the pond.

For whatever reason, Yelp emerged from the thicket of local-review web sites as the clear winner, and every day people invest millions of hours writing helpful, funny and cool reviews. Businesses, in turn, spend an increasing amount of time monitoring what people are saying, for both PR purposes and market research.

Because of the site’s popularity and the strong influence of social proof, a positive review from a credible Yelper can generate a tsunami of new business, and while the majority of reviews are of food and retail establishments, more and more people are writing about their experiences in the insurance and financial services realm.

So I recommend registering your agency with Yelp and encouraging your favorite clients to write a review.

Think about the possibility of being able to say this to a prospect: “I pride myself on my dedication to my clients; check out what people have said about my customer service on Yelp.”

That would be persuasive!