What if you, Mr. or Ms. Insurance Agent, could predict the future so you could keep your best customers? And what if you, Big Insurance Carrier, could work with your agents to more accurately price risks?
Well, you can.
All you both have to do is focus on sharing data and using up-to-date predictive analytics to target risks in order to retain customers, according to this article in PropertyCasualty360.
Sharing data can help you and your carriers operate more efficiently around “pricing and underwriting; customer-retention strategies; finding good prospects; customer segmentation; and cross-selling among various lines of business,” according to the article.
Here are five ways agents and carriers can use predictive analytics to improve business:
1. Out With the Old and in With the New. In the past, predictive analytics solutions were so costly and so slow that carriers just didn’t want to “take on the challenge of working with agents individually to target business,” according to Wade Bontrager, the author of the article.
But the days of expensive, old-school analytics tools are long gone. Now, using modern predictive analytics, carriers can analyze more data and get the answers they need more quickly. And cloud-based predictive analytics solutions make it even easier and less expensive for carriers to share that information with brokers and agents.
2. Share and Share Alike. Competition is tough. Customers really don’t care about loyalty these days. Now, it’s all about money – or more accurately, saving money. Modern predictive analytics can help carriers target and retain the best customers by enabling them to analyze more data and identify meaningful patterns.
The fact is carriers have access to data from large customer bases that they can analyze. And sharing insights with their agents based on these analyses can help both carriers and agents target the best customers.
3. Promotion, Promotion, Promotion. Working together, carriers and agents can improve their marketing efforts by tying certain promotions to certain customers. And they can use analytics to better predict which products to promote to which customers at just the right times.
4. Early Intervention is Key. Agents and carriers can use predictive analytics to identify customers who are at risk of leaving and intervene before they do.
5. Going the Last Mile. Competitive pricing is a huge part of retaining and attracting the best customers. “As the ‘last mile’ to the client, agents need confidence that the price they are quoting is the best one, matched closely to the risk,” according to Bontrager. “Pricing based on credit scores and other traditional rating variables alone doesn’t always achieve that objective.”
Modern predictive analytics, on the other hand, can help achieve that goal by taking the guesswork out of underwriting. Using analytics, carriers can look at a larger number of variables to determine which policies are likely to generate losses over time. That will then help agents sell their products because they know the prices are correctly matched to the risks.
Next Steps:
- Learn more by reading: What is Predictive Analytics?
