Does your agency practice a call mantra? What? No? You didn’t know you needed one, right? Well we believe every agency should have one that they practice to help solve a multitude of agency sins.
So what is a call mantra? We like to refer to a call mantra as the same steps you take every call through regardless of the type of call, transaction or customer. It’s repeatable and when repeated drives the highest results. Too often in insurance we do things inconsistently. Sometimes we do this, sometimes we do that or we allow the client to dictate the course of the call. We simply cannot allow that to happen. When we don’t have a clear cut plan of attack for success and customer experience we leave it up to the person, our team member or circumstance thus allowing us to have an unreliable result.
How do you build your call mantra in your agency? We have broken it down into several repeatable steps that everyone should be trained on and held accountable to. This, simply put, is the way you run your business:
- Standardized greeting: Your phone is the #1 way you communicate to clients. How it’s answered means everything on how the call will unfold. A strong positive greeting is the way to go. “Thank you for choosing Agency Name. How can we help you today?” or “It’s a great day at Agency Name, how can I make this the best call of your day?” When you start off strong it tells the caller this is going to be a great experience.
- The caller should be warm transferred if the person answering the phone is not the one handling the call. A warm transfer is alerting the agent who is handling the call to the person’s name, what they are looking for and any other short but important details. This way the caller does not have to repeat themselves and the agent can look up the account and be ready for results.
- Whomever is responsible for taking the call needs to start the call off by identifying the issue and then confirming all contact information BEFORE solving the problem. If the call is disconnected and you can’t call them back it’s a fail.
- Next, identify the issue and outline a solution. This needs to included steps you will take, steps the client may need to engage with (But always, always, always make it as simple as possible on them) and a timeline. You have to tell them exactly when you will be back in touch.
- Insert in a quick account review, just to confirm you have all of the best information and to confirm they are getting all of the discounts they deserve.
- End by recapping the call and entering notes into the management system while you recap the call. This means all calls are date stamped appropriately. You can easily then add a task to follow up when you say you are going to. Be certain to add the right priority level to this task. You are then free to take the next call or the next activity.
Every call into your agency is a gift and you need to maximize the value of it.
Bonus: If you learn something important about the person in the call add it as a sticky note ie. kids’ names, pet names, vacation spots, hobbies. This will ensure on the next call you can be even more personal.
