Insurance agents: what your software should remember for you

A client rings on Tuesday morning. He is angry, and with reason: the policy on his van lapsed a few days ago, nobody called him, and in the meantime he has insured it through someone else. The agent knows the date was written down somewhere. In a spreadsheet, in a notebook or on the phone. Nobody looked at it in time, that’s all.

The example is made up, but few agents haven’t been through something like it.

The insurer’s app is not your software

Policies are issued in the insurer’s application. It does its part well: it calculates the premium, prints the policy and sends the data where it needs to go. But it is built to serve the insurer. It doesn’t know that the same man told you two years ago he was planning to build a house, it doesn’t know when you last called him, and it doesn’t know he is due a call soon.

So the agent keeps a record of their own alongside it. At first it is a spreadsheet with a name, a policy number and an expiry date. A few years on, it has thousands of rows, a couple of versions and columns everyone added in their own way. It works, right up until it fails in the very week when most policies are up for renewal.

The unit of work is the client, not the policy

When records are kept by policy, every expiry is a separate event. When they are kept by client, you see the whole relationship. Each client record should show:

• who they are: a person, a household or a company, with the contact details they actually use
• what they have insured, whichever insurer holds the policy
• what expires when, and who in the office handles that conversation
• what they said in earlier conversations
• what they turned down, and why
• what they have agreed to be contacted about

With that in front of you, the renewal call doesn’t start with “which car was it again?” but where you left off last time. If all of this exists only in the agent’s memory, the clients belong to the agent, not to the office. That is knowledge the business doesn’t really have.

An agent knows a great deal about clients: addresses, vehicles, property, and for life cover sometimes their health. That is personal data. In the software it means everyone sees what they need for their work, there is a record of who opened what, and data doesn’t travel around in messages on personal phones.

An expiry is a task, not a date

A date in a spreadsheet does nothing on its own. It becomes part of the work only when it turns into a task, with the name of the person doing it and the day they should start.

Not every expiry is the same. Compulsory motor insurance is usually a short call. Cover for a company’s premises means a visit, checking what has changed and a conversation with the owner, so it needs to start much earlier. The software shouldn’t have one reminder for everything, then, but a rule for each type of cover: how far ahead to start, who does it and what gets prepared.

What gets recorded after the conversation matters just as much. “Renewed” is one outcome. “Went elsewhere on price” or “sold the vehicle” are others. After a year, those entries are exactly what shows where you lose clients: on price, on a late call, or on something you hadn’t even considered.

What the client mentioned in passing

Good business for an agent often starts with a sentence said in passing. “I’m opening a shop in the spring.” “We’re taking the children to the seaside this summer.” Unless it is written down as a reminder with a date, it stays a good intention.

The software doesn’t need to be clever here. It is enough that the note can be added to the client in half a minute, with the day it should come up, and that on that day it appears on the same list as the renewals. A client you ring just as the shop is about to open doesn’t experience it as a sales call but as someone paying attention.

Commission is checked policy by policy

Commission from insurers usually arrives as a lump sum, and an agent rarely has time to break it down. If the software knows which policy was issued, at what rate and when the premium was paid, it can work out what ought to arrive. The gap between expected and paid is then not a feeling that “something doesn’t add up”, but a list of policies to take to the insurer.

In an office with several agents, the same data shows who brought in how much, without a tally at the end of the month.

What not to ask of the software

It shouldn’t issue policies in place of the insurer’s application. That work stays where it is. Whatever the insurer already provides as a report or an export should be imported, not retyped. Whatever is entered by hand should fit into a few fields, because people soon stop opening software that asks them to write the same thing twice.

We design and deliver the client records, the renewal rules and the commission check as one system, built on what you already receive from your insurers. How that work runs, from the first conversation to the morning the renewal list appears on its own, is described on our CRM and ERP systems page. If your renewals spreadsheet stopped fitting on the screen long ago, tell us how you keep it, no client names needed.