My job working with independent agents and designing their websites I was ready to shop with an independent agent. I found a local agent and long story short I transferred all of our policies to them. Throughout this process, I thought to myself where did her old agent go wrong? Why did he loose our business? There are a couple key points where he easily could have made contact with us and possibly kept our business.

Each premium increase (A letter from the company does not count as a contact)

When I was added to her existing insurance policy (A great time to discuss insurance options)

When I called to ask about her existing policy prior to shopping for new insurance (I called her agent up to find out what her premium, expiration date and coverage A was)

Annual Reviews – She has yet to receive an annual review

What web resources could have used to save this account?

Annual Review Wizard – With the click of a button agents can send an Annual Review to a customer. No paper needed!
More Information on annual reviews http://demo2.cfluent.com/annual-insurance-reviews-tutorial

Simple Email – When I called her prior agent to request her policy information the agent could have easily got my email address and sent me an email. Even something as simple and quick as: “Thanks for calling us today, if you would like to review your insurance needs just let us know…”

Sorry we lost your business form – We’re sorry to have lost you as a customer, and would like to learn if there are improvements we can make that will help us not to lose excellent customers like you in the future. Please take a few moments to answer the five questions below, or feel free to call or email me with comments or questions, my contact information is below. Try out the form.

Today I want to talk about email hosting and hosting in-house vs paying for someone else to manage your email.

Many insurance agencies have gone the route of paying to have an Exchange server hosted in-house. There are some good reasons in doing this such as full control of the email server and some of the other great functionality that Exchange Server can bring to your agency. There are also some cons, someone in the agency has to be familiar with Exchange server, Exchange server is expensive. (Up to 35k first year costs if you include, new server, backup server, additional networking, Exchange server licensing, battery backup, etc.) Another thing to consider is:

What happens when the server goes down?
What if it goes down at 2:00 am?
What happens if your agency gets struck by lightning or a natural disaster hits?

Hosting email in-house may be more of a pain and way more expensive than it is worth.

What if you could have the following for your insurance agency:

10 gig email accounts (Thats enough to last a life time)
50 megabyte attachments (That is over 500 JPEG images)
Top Notch Spam Filtering
Triple Redundancy Back-Ups* (Email backed up in 3 physical locations throughout the US *-additional cost)
Virus Protection
Company Directory
Shared Calendars
100% Uptime Guarantee!!!
Tasks (Assign tasks to agency users)
Email that is managed by professionals who specialize in email
And Much more.

Now, what if I told you that you can have this for your agency VERY inexpensively?

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Why forcing the user to listen to audio is a negative thing.

With the advent of internet radio such as Pandora, last.fm and iTunes many users are constantly listening to music while they are surfing the web. These users are choosing to listen to music. Imagine a customer or prospect surfing the web while listening to their favorite song and they come across your insurance website. All the sudden they are inundated with sounds coming from your website. Do you think the users is more likely to turn off their favorite song or to just close your website? I think it is obvious that your website will come second to someone’s music. However, if your insurance website didn’t have any forced audio the user would probably still be surfing your website.

One of the things I’m constantly talking to my customers about is selling your website every chance you can. If you have a customer on the phone make sure you point out the FAQ section of your website or some other selling point to get the customer or prospect to use your website. However, your website has audio and now your CSR is forced to listen to an audio or video track while on the phone talking to a customer. Times that by 6 CSR and you have quite an orchestra of music in your office.

Types of audio you may find on a website:

Navigation Links – Typically a feature with sites using Flash. You mouse over a link and some type of noise or sound bite happens.
Pros – None.
Cons – Users are forced to hear a sound bite every time they click on a link in your website.

Characters – In an attempt to bring a more personal or “human presence” to a website, many website have purchased audio and visual characters to talk to their users.
Pros – Can add a personal touch to your website.
Cons – As good as the character may sound it is still a computer talking and not a person.

Animations – A flashy way to add pizzazz to your website.
Pros – Can add some flavor to your website.

Cons – Users may be required to see/hear it every time they visit your website. In general, users are going to insurance websites for research or to accomplish something like a quote or change request, not to watch an animation over and over again.

Videos – Anything from forced Flash videos to downloadable videos.
Pros – Can greatly benefit your website as long as it doesn’t automatically play.
Cons – If the video auto plays users will be forced to listen to it every time a page loads. Listening to the same message over and over again is extremely annoying. It can also be very costly to add custom video to your site.

Background Music – The Elevator music of websites. Not as common as today as it was back in the early 90′s but it is still an option.
Pros – Allows you to force old Billy Idol records into the minds of your website viewers.
Cons – No way to turn music off; continuous looping music on your website may cause users to have nightmares.

At the end of the day, I would say that spending $500 on pay-per-click advertising on a local news site is more beneficial than spending $500 on a video. This of course is only my opinion, I encourage users to comment below if you agree or disagree.

I have long encouraged agents to take control of their online reputation. Monitoring feedback left by others at various online rating and search services is a must. Encouraging positive feedback is even better.

I recently concluded a purchase on eBay (where buyers and sellers are sometimes referred to as the ‘EBay community) and received an email soliciting not just my direct feedback, but also a request to rate my experience via the eBay seller rating function. Here’s the email (names omitted to protect the innocent:

Read More: http://poormansplayground.blogspot.com/2009/01/your-insurance-agencys-community.html

We appreciate everyone’s support.

Have a great New Year!