There are many things insurance agencies need to do to make sure their business is growing each year, and not shrinking. Many of these same activities can help an agency figure out if there is something wrong that needs to be tweaked within their process. One of the most valuable steps you can take to monitor your business growth and identify areas that need a little push is to monitor your quote volume.
When you monitor your quote volume, you look at the quotes your producers were asked to give over a set period. You can also break the quotes down into lines of insurance, producer, and company to get some insight into trends, hot spots and weak points.
Monitoring Quote Volume
When you begin monitoring quote volume, you may notice some cyclical trends. This happens because insurance can be a seasonal product. For example, during tax return season, you may notice an upswing in auto insurance quotes as more people use their tax refund checks to buy vehicles. Home insurance quotes may go up during the summer, which is the time many people choose to move so they don't need to deal with Mother Nature's impediments while they transfer their possessions.
You also need to look outside normal cycles to identify economic changes that may affect your quote volume. As an example, while home and auto insurance quotes may have reduced between 2008 and 2009, certain tax credits given in 2010 may have created a temporary lift in quote volume.
Compare your quote volume during each month of the most recent year to the same month in the prior year. Keep tax and economic shifts in mind and identify up and down trends. As you do, try to also think of events within your office that may have positively or negatively impacted the quote volume. In this you should also consider ads that you've run in various outlets.
While this data is vital to creating more sales by expanding on what your agency is doing right, it's also great for ensuring consistent customer service all year round. By using this data to identify your individual busy "seasons" you'll be able to increase staffing and streamline processing before the season hits.
Quote Volume and Advertising
After comparing quotes month over month, you need to analyze your advertising results based on these comparisons. Try to break your data down further and see how many quotes you received from each individual method of advertising you used and how many sales were made after the quote was given.
Once you have a good idea of the results you got from each campaign, think about the target viewer for those that did poorly and those that did well. What are the differences between the two? For those that failed, did you target a market that isn't receptive or that doesn't match your ideal prospect profile?
Quote Volume by Producer
When you compare the quote volumes of your producers against one another, at least in offices in which producers bring in their own leads, you can see which producers are meeting goals, identifying the right kind of prospects and are showing the ability to get people interested in your lines of insurance.
While quote volume may not be an accurate measure of attempts or prospect outreach, it can indicate who your office leaders are, which sets up a wonderful opportunity to allow your quote leaders to talk about how they are so successful. This can be done in a meeting or in small groups for those producers who need additional guidance.
Quote Volume by Carrier
In order to give your clients the best range of products, the best prices and the best service, your agency probably has many different insurance carriers available. But it is difficult to stay abreast of company underwriting, rate and guideline changes which might mean that a small percentage of companies shake out as your "top" quoted companies while others languish in obscurity. If you see that your quote volume is heavily weighted toward just a few carriers, it's important to assess why. Talk to your producers and find out if it's an issue of education, as many producers simply feel more comfortable quoting and selling companies that they know really well, or if certain carriers have less competitive rates, stiffer underwriting guidelines, or are difficult for producers to deal with due to customer service or automated help line issues.
You'll also want to find out if any insurer is offering special incentives in order to get your producers to quote them more often. This practice can be a conflict of interest to the agency as you may not find those carriers to be the agency's preferred carrier to place a high majority of business with.
Quote volume is a sometimes overlooked indicator of agency problems and successes. And no matter which is the case for your agency, it is data you need to examine and utilize in order to improve your process, success rate and closing ratio.
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