Next Generation Digital Engagement for the Modern Insurance Agent

Digital Transformation is top of mind in the insurance industry. The conversations that customers used to have in person or on the phone are increasingly happening over digital channels: web, email, text, and social media. The challenge we face is to make those conversations as continuous and natural as a face-to-face conversation in an office or over a meal.

That is why I recently joined Hearsay as Vice President of Insurance Solutions. As a Certified Property and Casualty Underwriter (CPCU) and because of my prior experience at Guidewire, a P&C software provider, I know first-hand that insurers are in a never-ending search for growth. Unfortunately, most digital transformation investments have gone into back-office, self-service, and direct-to-consumer solutions, while their existing agents struggle with offline and manual processes. But Digital Transformation is about more than self-service. By bringing digital transformation to the agent, incumbent insurers can better leverage the competitive advantage of their existing distribution networks.

The lynchpin of the insurer-customer conversation is the agent. Over the past decade, Hearsay has built an omnichannel engagement platform that manages digital conversations across text, web, email, and social media for over 150,000 insurance agents and financial advisors. For those agents, the first step is done: getting those interactions automated, tracked and compliant. This enables insurers to understand the flow of digital conversations, what’s working and what isn’t.

But digital transformation for the agent doesn’t stop there. The second step is to begin to automate those interactions and to guide best practices based on what is being learned. Enter Agent Actions, an engagement workflow automation solution designed to improve business outcomes by extending best practice enterprise workflows to field agents.  An extension of the Hearsay platform, these configurable, specialized workflows eliminate time-consuming manual processes and provide operational guidance, automation, and tracking.

Many people I’ve spoken with over the years have suspected there are latent sales and retention opportunities in a superior claims experience, a reduced premium on renewal, or a delinquent payment. Because Hearsay can automate and guide the agent-client conversation after one of these events, our customers will start to learn how.  

A number of early adopters have been working with Hearsay to automate key agent workflows like corporate lead follow-up, recovering delinquent accounts, and proactive outreach during policy renewals to optimize retention and cross-selling. American Family Insurance is an excellent example. The Hearsay team worked closely with American Family to customize Agent Actions for specific billing workflows to drive higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.

If you missed the press release, here’s what American Family said about our work together: “Our partnership is centered around using Hearsay's technology to drive customer loyalty and address our billing response and follow-up processes to help reduce the possibility of policy lapses in the future,” said Cesar Pinzon, Vice President of Sales Strategy and Support, American Family Insurance. “The Hearsay team worked very closely with us to devise workflows that address our specific objectives. We continue to explore ways to utilize this technology to drive policy acquisition and servicing workflows for our agents to be more impactful with customers long-term.”

Learn more about Hearsay Agent Actions at https://hearsaysystems.com/advisor-actions/.