In this digital transformation era, the demand for automation and technology accessibility is constantly growing. As a result, insurance businesses are feeling pressurized to reinvent their customer services. One such area is pricing and quotes; where insurers need to ensure accurate and efficient are provided to customers. At the quoting stage, personalization, rapid response, and accuracy are beneficial for a successful sales process.

Despite the vitality of the quoting process, many businesses still rely on manual processes and are often held back by legacy architecture. These disconnected systems force organizations to undertake repetitive, tedious & mundane tasks that consume a lot of time and impede their productivity. As a result, the sales cycle gets prolonged, and the clients are misquoted, leading to high customer dissatisfaction and attrition.

Then what should businesses do to increase efficiency in quoting processes? How are organizations supposed to address this problem?

That’s where automated insurance quoting process comes into the picture.

Instead of making your potential customers wait and submit their personal data, your company can automate the entire quoting process.

The automated quoting process helps insurers gather essential information from leads and quickly provide them with approximations of cost. This way, instead of having to call up some agent or fix a face-to-face meeting, prospects can get an estimate of the amount they would have to pay. Thus, in addition to improving customer service, automated insurance quoting system will boost lead generation and even decrease operational costs.

This blog will discuss the challenges related to the manual quoting process and look at how automation can help mitigate these issues.

Traditional Quote Processing Challenges

Outdated Information

Most insurance carriers use spreadsheets and documents to manage price lists, contracts, and important information; creating a high chance for the older versions of these documents to be circulated and used by the company.

Moreover, keeping the organization’s information up-to-date can be challenging, especially if your business is in midst of restructuring or have to keep track of several systems across the company.

All these may lead to quoting incorrect prices and reducing your profitability.

Increased Errors

Decentralized data across multiple systems leads to increased chances of errors such as data entry mistakes, price discrepancies, and other blunders that will make your quoting process more complex rather than making a bridge to bring on new customers. Most of these issues are a part of manual procedures and are often caused by human errors. For instance, an executive might forget to update information or miscalculate an expense.

As a result, the customer can be over-charged or under-charged. Ultimately, quoting errors can affect your business profitability in the long run and may even be considered unprofessional, leading to increased client attrition.

Lengthy Quoting Processes

You might be tired of waiting in the long queue for quote approvals. But you are not alone! Insurers using conventional methods have to go through the necessary reviews and approvals, which are one of the most frequently identified pain points of the quoting process.

Besides, if the process involves too much back-and-forth communication, mistakes, or clarification requests, it leads to a potential conflict in the client’s expectations, as nobody likes to wait. Once clients are dissatisfied, it doesn’t take them long to walk away and find some other efficient insurer.

Missed Up-selling Opportunities

Manual quote processes divert the focus of sales professionals away from selling. When your sales representatives are overburdened with tasks like correcting errors in miscalculated quotes or following up on approvals, they lose time that could have been spent maximizing the sales impact.

When sales professionals spend too much time on manual tasks, they miss out on opportunities to up-sell or cross-sell to the existing customer base.

Up-selling and cross-selling to the current client base can increase customer retention and drive profits. A recent report highlights, “a 5% increase in customer retention results in an increase in profit of 25% to 95%.”

Excessive Discounts

Discounts are an effective way to encourage customers to buy your products and services.

But when too many clients are given overly generous or inaccurate discounts, the profits take a hit in the long run. This problem is pretty common where the sales team doesn’t have an automated system to perform calculations based on the individual buyer’s profile. They tend to make errors ending up providing unnecessarily excessive discounts that lead to business losses.

How Can Automated Insurance Quote Processing Increase Sales?

To become successful, insurance carriers should prioritize customer needs while maintaining business practices that increase profits and promote growth. The automated insurance quoting process helps insurers to attain these objectives.

Now that we know the challenges of the traditional quoting process, let’s go over the key benefits of this technology.

Eliminates Paperwork

Leveraging automation in the insurance quoting process will eliminate any kind of manual paperwork and enable carriers to file & maintain documents automatically. This will result in considerable cost & time savings. Moreover, all the relevant and crucial information can be accessed from anywhere and anytime.

Improved Lead Generation

One of the crucial advantages of automating quote processing is that it helps insurers with the lead generation process. How? By catering to the requirements of potential clients.

Customers want to quickly acquire the information they seek without providing too many details and going through a lengthy process. So, if your company doesn’t readily offer insights about their probable premiums — they’ll just switch to another carrier.

Additionally, automated quoting solutions create a new opportunity to build relationships with prospects and influence them with your services. For example, in order to acquire quotes, leads will input some basic details about themselves. Then, even if they do not request an estimate immediately, you can add them to your CRM and start the fostering process.

Reduced Operational Expenses

Another crucial benefit of the automated quoting process is the reduction in operational expenses.

By automating processes associated with calculating quote estimates and sharing them with prospects, you will be able to free up the time of your team. Instead of setting up face-to-face meetings and performing calculations manually, your teams will be able to concentrate on delivering a top-notch experience to your clients and bringing in enhanced profits.

Enhanced Customer Service

Customer experience is a significant part of insurance sales. The automated quoting process works in various ways to improve customer service.

By embracing this technology, insurers will eliminate needless paperwork, and face-to-face contact will no longer be necessary. Moreover, it also decreases the time spent on making a purchase and increases transparency.

Finally, if carriers ensure that all of the above features are implemented appropriately, it will guide the customers seamlessly from being a prospect to a lead, and in the end, a loyal customer.

Final Thoughts

If conventional manual processes are slowing down your internal processes, it might be the right time to revamp your quoting process.

Streamlining quote processing not only provides automation and cost reduction benefits to your organization but also improves customer experience, leading to increased sales.

Are you looking to make your quoting process seamless with automation?

Get in touch with us today! We will be happy to help you!