In tough economic times an excellent customer and partner service experience and a problem-solving mindset are essential tools for insurers. Without them, keeping customers becomes very difficult.
Group insurance is often seen by employers as a 'nice to have' employee benefit, rather than an essential component of employee compensation. So when times get tough economically and companies have to cut expenses, group insurance expenditure is often a candidate for a trim.
Being flexible and responsive can often salvage a customer relationship. In order to do this, you need an administrative platform, products and business processes that can easily change and adapt.
Here are some things to think about when retention is the name of the game.
Offer an alternative product
Let's imagine you've got a major group spending about $100,000 a year for group life and medical insurance. You learn that they have a CEO instruction to reduce or eliminate that expense.
Are you ready to proactively offer this customer a lower cost option? Have you supplied your broker partners with support material to assist them with difficult conversations with their customers? Have you trained and rehearsed a playbook for offering a lower level of coverage including helping the business owner with communicating change with their team?
If a customer says 'I just can't afford it any more, I need to drop the plan entirely', it may already be too late. If you and your broker partners have empathy with the business owner, you can help them through a difficult business situation by proactively helping them manage cost. If can help the business owner solve their cashflow problem, you can increase the odds of keeping that customer while also building loyalty as a business partner they can trust and rely on.
You could offer products with lower levels of cover, offer a voluntary product to help the business owner cost-share with their employees, offer discounts for annualized payment, and other methods.
Key to this is knowing your customer's business circumstances. Reaching out to them outside of the normal plan renewal process is essential. The better you know your customer, the better able you are to serve their needs.
Making the difficult easier to deal with is really important. No business owner want to tell their people that they are taking a valued benefit away from them. If you can help them through that difficult process you could win a customer for life.
Get great at continuation
Sometimes the business situation will be unavoidable. Your customer has to lay off a substantial part of their workforce.
This is traumatic for all involved, especially the former employee who has just been laid off and is now looking for a new job.
Most group insurers offer a 'continuation' option for when an employee leaves a group scheme. This allows the person to continue to be covered by the insurance plan, but now they are responsible for paying for it.
The situation when a group of laid off employees are wondering about their future means offering continuation options to them requires a high degree of care and empathy from the insurer.
How easy or difficult are you making this process for the affected person? Are you sending them a blank form to fill in, making them feel like you have no relationship with them at all? Are you acknowledging their financial uncertainly - after all, they have just lost their job, yet they feel that insurance coverage is important enough to them to want to explore paying for it themselves.
If your administrative system is modern and you are offering online service to the person, you may have already built some relationships with the individual. This is the time to use the mutual trust that has been established for both of your benefit.
The former employee may be feeling lost and on their own. This situation is not a candidate for automation, or worse yet, generative AI! Put your best human beings on the case. Reach out to the affected people and have a conversation with them. They will already be very stressed. Knowing that you are at least listening and can answer questions they have about the change process will earn your their thanks and respect - and possibly a customer for life.
Plan flexibility
Sometimes what holds insurers back from offering plans with a high amount of flexibility is their group policy administration system and business processes.
If your PAS and your associated business processes are inflexible and hard to change, you are putting yourself at a competitive disadvantage in the battle for customer retention. Sentro gives our customers the most powerful and easy to configure group policy administration platform on the market today. If you are worried about your ability to quickly respond to new customer circumstances because your admin system is hard to change. please contact us - we can help!