The key to valuable, productive, and empathetic insurance industry agents is emotional intelligence (EQ).
When the Marshall Fire devastated communities in Boulder, CO, the state asked insurers to step in and offer extended living expenses policies to residents that had lost everything. Of the companies that had policyholders in the affected area, all 10 agreed to help.
It’s this type of empathy in difficult times that makes the insurance customer experience (CX) more profound.
Insurance market challenges are leading to significant shifts in how policies are structured and claims handled. Despite their willingness to help their customers cope better, insurers are struggling with the rise in homeowner costs and increased payouts for disasters like wildfires, flooding, and storms. According to Deloitte, 2022 was the eighth consecutive year featuring at least 10 US catastrophes, causing over $1 billion in losses. These losses caused property-catastrophe reinsurance costs for primary non-life carriers to jump by 30% in 2023 and forced insurance companies to consider scaling back in—or moving completely out of—catastrophe-prone states.
MITIGATING FACTORS
And there are several factors beyond disasters. Economic uncertainties are causing mounting insurance-industry strains as well. Homeowners insurance trends show that the price of single-family residential home construction materials soared 34%, and commercial property premiums rose by an average of 20%. These factors all contribute to the many frustrations that customers might be already feeling by the time they get an agent on the phone.
There’s no doubt this is an emotional time for insurance agents and property owners alike. While market uncertainty is hard to control, insurance companies should focus on what they can control—how they are perceived by their customers. Enhancing insurance customer experience is more critical than ever.
Building an effective customer experience starts with having high-quality, prepared, engaging CX agents. The key to valuable, productive, and empathetic agents is emotional intelligence (EQ). Emotional intelligence enhances customer relations, drives industry change, and boosts agent performance in challenging market dynamics.
How do we know EQ matters? The proof is in the numbers. Companies with higher EQ scores saw greater amounts of leadership, productivity, performance, engagement, and confident decision-making among agents. And brands that deliver good customer experiences can boost their annual recurring revenue (ARR) by 300% over three years.
Relationships are the beating heart of meaningful CX. During catastrophic loss, having to file insurance claims is stressful and emotional. People might have lost their homes, possessions—or even loved ones. Or companies might be trying to regain financial footing and support their employees. Agents that can guide customers with compassion and understanding through their issues make them feel reassured in difficult times.
EQ and customer loyalty go hand in hand. It can make or break the interaction when a homeowner is coming to terms with major damage or the loss of a home on the phone with an agent who needs to listen and still perform their tasks. But what does EQ look like for insurance agents?
Emotional intelligence includes the ability to pay attention to what customers are “trying” to convey, listen to details carefully, and demonstrate genuine empathy. People with high EQ can regulate their own emotions while accurately perceiving others’ emotions and building strong interpersonal communications. While these might be considered “soft skills,” EQ-driven customer service agents can enhance insurance CX, and companies that lead in CX outperform competitors by nearly 80%.
Generating positive impact on their clients’ lives can strengthen both insurers’ business operations and their brand reputation. Agents with high EQ are on the frontline of determining that impact.
Greater EQ in agents goes far beyond just helping customers during hard times. Turnover, technology, and the lasting impact from COVID-19 are showing how the industry needs to evolve to keep up with expectations.
Given the time it takes to find talented agents, investing in them to succeed will help your company. Agents have a demanding job, and turnover rates can reach 45%. Building their emotional intelligence can help drive insurance-industry innovations across a range of key operations.
Policy administration: When agents handle front-end services such as sales, conversions, and quotes, listening skills and the ability to gauge different perspectives help them to solve problems quickly and discover innovative solutions for customers.
Supporting customers: Explaining policy benefits and reinstating policies requires deft thinking and swift action. Insurance-agent training that includes a focus on EQ empowers employees to think creatively to help policyholders.
Account administration: Employees managing billing, refunds, and accounts can be empathetic to the needs of their customers as well as to the overall health of the company.
Claims process: Building stronger balance sheets requires all hands on deck, especially as payouts grow in the increasing risk landscape. Competitive advantages come from EQ-trained agents with their fingers on the pulse of the industry who are encouraged in their work culture to offer suggestions and ideas.
The right tools to support agent EQ can make a powerful combination for greater CX. Blending artificial intelligence (AI) with a human touch can transform how agents are trained. It can apply speech recognition and natural language processing to customer interaction data across channels, empowering agents to learn from their interactions and understand more clearly what customers are looking for, while helping the company spot performance trends. AI plays a key role in providing real-time feedback as well, helping agents analyze their personal communications and empathy skills on the spot.
In addition, before an agent even gets on the phone with a client, there is a wealth of data they can use to learn what their clients might need. In addition, data analytics and AI are more accurately predicting both customer-call dispositions and agent-response resolution paths.
Customer and transaction data come from an expanding amount of touchpoints and sources, from social media to chatbots, and employees need to quickly sift through that data to provide the right information. AI and analytics can easily map data from those sources and transform it into valuable information. Unlocking key behaviors, patterns, and insights helps agents get closer to their customers and offer more personalized services. In real time, AI can serve as a digital assistant, helping agents make every interaction quicker, more informed, and compliant.
Empowering agents starts with rigorous training and the right technology tools. Thorough onboarding endows CX agents with the skills, confidence, and company knowledge to address customer issues without waiting for input. Quick help leads to quick resolutions, which lead to increased customer loyalty.
Ubiquity builds rigorous EQ training into its customized CX solutions. We ensure agents are knowledgeable, well-trained employees with the expertise to help customers receive the best resolutions the first time (Case Study), more frequently, and with more empathy.
We set up measurable CX programs with clear performance indicators that give agents meaningful benchmarks to work toward, so they know what success looks like. And we build feedback into every communication and ensure agents have the right information for every interaction, using AI and data analytics across all channels, from phone calls to chatbots.
Our approach to your CX is human-centered. Learn more about how we integrate EQ into the insurance industry.
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