One of our biggest insurance consultant services is helping agencies move from a reactive service model to a proactive customer experience. This process helps everything from retention, account rounding, referrals, reducing remarketing and boosting morale. Yet the biggest challenge we see is literally fear of the phone. For most account managers they are more than fine to pick up a call and handle what needs to get done but the idea of calling someone proactively makes them shake!
When we first started launching this process we underestimated how affected team members were by the simple idea of calling people. We started diving deeper and learned that account managers had the following assumptions:
- They would be interrupting people
- No one wants to talk their agent
- Commercial CSRs felt that the business owners would be on job sites and the calls would be awkward
- They struggled on how to start calls, how to introduce themselves
- Many were convinced the client would only want to talk about rate
- Almost all of the teams thought calling customers would increase remarketing attempts
Even the best account managers turned out to be terrified of calling customers proactively. One of them actually broke out in hives. I have to say I was shocked. People who are on the phone all the time are scared to call the customer to thank them, update contact information and say hi! It was crazy!
What we found was that after making 5-10 calls everyone became at ease. They found that people thanked them, they found new account rounding opportunities and people loved hearing from them. Don’t let fear of the phone get your team down! As an agency owner you get to choose your client experience.
