Tips for a Productive and Profitable Open Enrollment Season

Open Enrollment Season Preparation for Insurance Agencies

The couple of months that encompass Open Enrollment season and Annual Election period are inevitably always a busy time for insurance agencies. You're working with insurance companies, carriers, and business owners all at once, trying to provide the best service possible to your clients. To do this at scale, you need tools that make you and your team more efficient.

For a productive Open Enrollment season, you need to be extremely organized and have processes and tools in place to support effective lead tracking to client servicing. 

Ask yourself:

• Do all of your agents know what's expected for follow-up on new leads? 
• Do you have cross-selling tactics in place for after OE ends? 
• Do you have a way of automating the policy renewal process?

In this article, we’ll discuss how agencies utilize an agency management system (AMS) like AgencyBloc to have a productive and profitable Open Enrollment period. We’ll cover how an AMS helps you get organized, gather and track leads, automate the lead follow-up process, and improve client retention.

Getting Organized with an Agency Management System

When the goal is increased efficiency, getting organized should be a top priority. Insurance agents spend their day working with leads, clients, policies, agents, and carriers. Whether you sell health insurance, ACA-related products, Medicare, employee benefits, or any other type of insurance benefits, having all of that data in one place is critical for organization.

Managing Your Book of Business

When an insurance agency is extremely organized, the data they need is only a few clicks away, meaning they can sell and service clients with ease. 

How do they do it? With an industry-specific agency management system. An agency management system (AMS) is a SaaS (software as a service) technology that insurance agencies use to organize their book of business and more effectively run their operations.

AgencyBloc, an AMS built specifically for life and health insurance agencies, helps you organize all of the data you capture when working with individuals, agents, carriers, and large or small businesses on their group insurance plans. 

And because an AMS is industry specific, records often already have industry-specific fields on the screen, like policy number, carrier, coverage type, and group policy information (if applicable). What’s not there that might be unique to your agency can be created and tracked with custom fields.

Watch a 5-minute overview video of AgencyBloc, an AMS built for life and health insurance agencies.

Plus, with an AMS that’s hosted in the cloud (online access with an internet connection), your data is always backed up and safe, accessible on mobile devices as you work on the go.

Learn more about book of business organization: 10 Impactful Ways to Keep Your Book of Business Organized.

Lead & Sales Tracking

Though servicing your current clients should be your first priority, every insurance agency must also keep new leads coming. There are a few ways insurance agencies generate leads. There’s digital tactics like blogging, social media ads, and utilizing lead forms on their website, and there are more traditional tactics like outbound calling and direct mail. 

All of these methods bring leads that you need to track as they move throughout your sales process. Using the right tools, this process can mean increased conversions for your agency.

Lead Tracking & Follow-up

Timely sales follow-up is extremely important. In fact, 35-50% of sales go to the first salesperson to contact the prospect. Not to mention, some sales take as many as 5 follow-ups and 44% of salespeople give up after just one contact. So, it’s important to have a process in place for immediate follow-up.

Automate your lead follow-up with AgencyBloc. Using Lead Forms and Automated Workflows, automatically assign a task to agents to reach out to new leads, and send an automated email letting the new lead know you've received their info.

From there, be sure you never miss an important touchpoint. To do this, you have to always know where your leads are at in the sales process. Using AgencyBloc's Sales Pipeline, track leads and opportunities, forecast potential revenue, and close more deals.

Track opportunities as they move from the new lead stage closer to the enrollment process to ensure your client has the best experience possible.

Source | AgencyBloc

Without an AMS, it can be difficult to know where your leads are at in the process and who is doing what. This can lead to poor prospect communication and double-work which is unproductive for your agency.

Learn more in our free guide: The Insurance Agency’s Guide to Lead & Sales Management: Methodologies, processes, and tools that work.

Sales Reporting

After each Open Enrollment season, analyze your sales efforts so you can make each year your best year yet. Using AgencyBloc's real-time graphs and custom reporting, you're able to get a quick glimpse at where you are and where you're headed, or dive deeper for more in-depth analysis.

View the profitability of your lead sources so you can be smarter about where you place lead generating resources. See who your highest producing agents are so you can reward high-performers and coach those who need it most. 

Source | AgencyBloc

Client Service & Retention

Keeping clients with your agency is all about impressive service and maintaining communication with them. In fact, 68% of people are willing to pay more to work with companies who provided better customer service. In the insurance world, this means friendly service that’s quick and effective. 

This goes back to organization: does your agency have the capability to quickly pull up client information and answer their questions on the spot? Does your agency have a way to proactively communicate about what matters to your clients most?

Once they’re impressed with your service, keep it going with valuable communication throughout the year. Not sure when to reach out? You should be reaching out whenever you believe there’s something of value to share with them.

And, again, you have to ask yourself, do you have the right tools in place to do this? With an AMS like AgencyBloc, you’re better able to service your clients quickly through policy tracking and cross-selling, and you’re able to keep the lines of communication open via built-in email tools and automated task management.

Policy Management

Insurance agencies need to track policies at a detailed level, including things like application stage, coverage type, co-payment details, benefit options, providers, deductibles, dependents, enrollments and elections, and much more. 

With AgencyBloc, manage policies tied to individuals and groups with ease, and maintain incredible organization and efficiency across your team. 

Source | AgencyBloc

With this information at your fingertips, you can adequately service clients knowing you're working with thorough, up-to-date information. 

Cross-Selling

You already know that your probability of selling to an existing client is higher than closing a deal with a new lead. Your current clients have already bought from you; they already trust you. So, try to find areas where they aren’t covered or are covered by another agency and chat with them about the coverage options you provide.

You can identify clients that have this type of coverage, but not that type. Here are a few examples that are Open Enrollment-focused:

• They have health insurance coverage but don’t have life insurance 
• They have employee health coverage but don't have a comprehensive dental plan
• They have health insurance but don’t have critical illness

Depending on what you sell, you can probably think of plenty more examples of where to look for cross-sell opportunities. Just make sure you have an easy way to identify them within your book.

Quickly pull up this information with the help of an agency management system (AMS). Without one, you may find yourself spending a lot of time manually going through the data. 

Within your AMS, your individuals and groups are linked to policies, so the system knows who has this coverage, but not that coverage. With AgencyBloc’s Policy Cross-Sell Report, you can search on all of the coverage types in your database and single out the opportunities instantly.

Source | AgencyBloc

Another way to identify cross-selling opportunities within AgencyBloc is directly through the Email Marketing feature where you can identify the opportunities and contact them all in one step.

Source | AgencyBloc

Client Communication

Providing a great experience and servicing your clients well requires excellent communication. With regular communication, you're better able to address issues before you lose a client and keep client retention high.

There are several reasons to reach out to clients after Open Enrollment season ends:

• Send them additional resources on products you sell that you didn’t speak with them about yet
• Send a newsletter that helps employees get the most of their health benefits
• Send a survey to ask how you’re doing/ask for referrals
• Send coverage updates (like when carriers make changes that may affect your client)
• Send notifications regarding any special enrollment periods that pertain to them
• Send reminders for Open Enrollment next year
• Send a “happy birthday” email each year

Check out these email templates to get you started: Client Retention Emails & Workflow Recipes.

Does your agency have a way to automate these messages to clients? If not, they may be forgotten. 

With AgencyBloc, send mass emails, like a newsletter or asking for client feedback, or automate emails like renewal reminders, Open Enrollment notices, and birthday wishes.

Ready for a productive and profitable Open Enrollment season?

Like we said, a productive and profitable Open Enrollment season begins and ends with an organized book of business. From there, use tools like Automated Workflow and reporting to help your team stay efficient and effective. 

AgencyBloc is an agency management system that helps life and health insurance agencies grow and secure their business with an industry-specific CRM, commissions processing, and integrated business and marketing automation.