The drive behind every small business owner must be to increase sales through improved relationships. If you’re going to increase the number of customers, you have to take approaches that will maximize the use of your time and provide a quality experience to all customers. In this post, I want to discuss how you can organize your time better to ensure that you are available to sit down with prospective customers on a daily basis. They deserve your time to answer their questions before they choose a life insurance or annuity product. I decided to do some reflection on agency to customer relationships. Interestingly, I concluded that your leadership and sharing of industry knowledge with customers and prospects is the single biggest factor that you can change to increase sales.

Create a Customer Service Routine

Your aim is to increase sales, so, you’re going to start by giving yourself additional training. What do you need to learn about customer service techniques? What products do you need to research more? Questions like these can help you grow in your sales profession and then share more insights with customers and employees working in your agency. You need to establish a routine for each meeting where you will sit down with a client and work through the process of identifying their needs and matching them with the best product. Then, use the routine consistently, being sure to standardize customer service experiences. This creates a better brand for people who come into the office. You can also develop a routine for how you handle consultations over the phone and even use a set of canned responses for emails, online chats, and social media conversations. Some small business owners even use texting systems now to keep in touch with customers because this is more convenient than talking on the phone or messaging over email.

Don’t Be Afraid to Change Office Routines

If you’re going to satisfy customers who have many options for where they can purchase life insurance and annuity products, it’s worth improving your current office system. If your agency uses outdated ways of communicating with customers or doesn’t change anything about the customer service experience, you may not be able to stay relevant. This is akin to a doctor’s office that won’t go to a computerized medical records system. A medical practice with only paper documents would find it hard to meet many requirements for the protection of patient health information. For example, in the event of a fire or a water leak, paper records could be damaged beyond repair. Then, the practice could not respond to many requests for patient records. Look for phone system updates and customer service software that will help you better respond to customers and track their needs.

You Can Do It!

Having successfully built my own insurance agency specializing in my life insurance and annuity products, I am happy to offer professional development opportunities to other people who are starting an agency or trying to increase their success within their current agency. The insurance agency and the individual agent who sells to people will only stay relevant if people can get an experience through a personal meeting that’s more helpful than they could get over the phone or via online chat with an insurance company. I am all for helping customers to select the right products, but this should take place when they are ready and feel connected to the right options. For more details on building better agent to customer relationships and improving your customer service routines, please check back on the blog. I want you to sell what you believe in while growing your agency the right way!