July 15, 2024

5 Strategies to Attract and Retain Insurance Clients

Nina Stanley

Head of Channel Sales at Healthee
July 15, 2024

Healthee’s VP of People, Debbie Sharvit, gives step-by-step instructions for how to write a company culture book that will engage your employees. Here’s a sneak peek:

1. How to position your company culture book for the modern workforce.

2. The 12 steps to writing a company culture book that’s thorough and readable.

3. Suggested reading and inspiration from other organizations.

As a health insurance broker, your clients rely on you to educate them on the right benefits and help them navigate the complicated world of healthcare. But after the healthcare plans are set up, HR pros and employees are left to their own devices to figure out the answers to endless benefits questions.

In fact, people teams spend an average of nine hours per week fielding questions about benefits and don’t have the bandwidth to answer every employee’s inquiry, become experts in an industry as complex as healthcare, and provide their people with accurate, precise, and helpful information. This leaves HR overwhelmed and their employees frustrated.

Your clients need help managing health benefits. How can your insurance brokerage stay ahead of the competition and solve your customers’ pain points?

5 Strategies to Attract More Insurance Clients

1. Help your clients get the most out of their health benefits

When employees have questions about their health benefits, they usually turn to HR. But HR is swamped with hiring, payroll, and internal comms, and doesn’t always have the bandwidth to answer insurance-related questions — especially since they’re not health professionals.

But there are solutions out there to help.

2. Offer valuable insights through innovative strategies

Traditional brokers spend inordinate amounts of time gathering and sifting through health plan data to best advise their clients. Using automated tools like AI and analytics can help expedite this process by analyzing enormous amounts of information in record time.

AI and analytics can also help match employee profiles with their available budget and health records to suggest new policy options and create personalized recommendations. Brokers can use these insights to make suggestions that benefit their clients.

If you want to ensure that you’re seeing the whole picture, harness the power of analytics.

3. Anticipate client needs

Tech capabilities can show your customers’ preferences, like how they like to be contacted, their previous requests and queries, and whether they like to deal with a certain member of staff.

This will help you serve your client in the most efficient and effective way, and demonstrate to the regulators that you’re fulfilling your duty of care.

4. Create a frictionless customer experience

Here are a few ways to ensure your customer experience is smooth and enjoyable:

    1. Identify customer touchpoints – Determine each moment that your customer comes into contact with your brand. They expect consistency, speed, and reliability, so make sure you’re providing a dependable consumer experience across all your touchpoints — from your website to customer service and beyond.

    1. Analyze and plan accordingly – Once you’ve identified all customer touchpoints, it’s time to understand where the opportunities to provide a better customer experience lie. The goal is to reduce as much redundancy and friction throughout the process as possible. For example, having a team with a low SLA or an unhelpful chatbot feature are points of friction that can cause customers to go elsewhere.

    1. Be proactive – Prevent friction before it even occurs! Being proactive means anticipating customer needs, and solving pain points before they even arise. This shows that you care, and are continually working to improve your customer experience.

    1. Make it personal – Customers love a personalized experience that caters to their specific tastes, behaviors, and buying patterns. You can use technology to help learn about your customers and anticipate their needs (another key step in being proactive!). In fact, personalization can be so powerful, research shows it can account for a 10% sales increase.

5. Cater to your existing clients

Attracting new clients is harder and more expensive than retaining existing ones. But health insurance brokers tend to ignore this by offering lower prices to new customers. Instead of spending time, energy, and resources on recruiting new clients, focus on rewarding loyalty and better serving your existing ones.

6. Offer a new type of Open Enrollment experience

The Takeaway

While staying ahead of your competition can seem overwhelming, the above tips will help you keep clients happy. Remember to always keep thinking about what will help the client, and introduce innovation into your everyday dealings with clients. This will truly keep you ahead of the curve!

Interested in learning more about landing a Healthee competitive edge in health benefits navigation for your clients?