Sales Column: How automation keeps brokers in front of clients

I had the privilege of interviewing Carol Jardine on a podcast at the end of her final day before retiring as Wawanesa’s president of Canadian P&C operations.

What stood out for me is how our conversation illustrated the difference between knowledge and wisdom. At this stage of her career, Jardine possesses an abundance of wisdom.

Insurance is a people business, but we can easily get stuck in red tape, bureaucratic processes and data entry that pulls us away from connecting, advising and sharing the wisdom we have with clients and peers. Automation helps solve this problem.

Leveraging automation in your brokerage confers many benefits, and I’m a proponent of finding ways to automate anything that’s repeated every day. There are obvious reasons for doing this. It makes your business more future-proof, increases productivity, reduces errors, and creates consistencies while saving time and money.

More importantly, it frees up your people for human-based decisions and allows them to share and gain wisdom, which is a vital part of our industry.

Introducing automation to your brokerage may seem daunting but doesn’t have to be. Digital technologies are cheaper and more accessible than ever before. Automation can be leveraged in virtually every area of your business. We’ve even automated our office front door to lock and unlock at specific times.

Start by identifying opportunities to create operational efficiencies. From there, search for the repetitive tasks in different roles that don’t need to be completed by a person. For example, we found a lot of time was wasted manually emailing welcome packages to new clients each month. Automating this was an easy fix.

Examining where automation could strengthen your business can be eye-opening and provides a better understanding of all the manual, tedious activities your team is doing. It’s also fun to brainstorm how automation could allow them to do more of the high-value work they enjoy.

We leverage automation across our brokerage. For lead management, we use a combination of automated texts, emails and queued-up phone calls to reach prospective clients. This allows our sales team to connect with more people and focus on selling, which has improved growth.

We use Pathway to automate customer emails and surveys. We use Quotey to automate getting and comparing commercial quotes. We use automation for scheduling online ads and social media content. Our HR system automates onboarding tasks. It’s hard to think of parts of our business where automation doesn’t play a role.

It’s important to make sure you’ve defined a good process that works well before you automate it. Problems crop up if you skip that step and jump from having an idea right into automation. Attempting to go faster and removing the human element by automating something that’s not great means you’re just speeding up a process that wasn’t working in the first place.

But when done correctly, automation will allow you to share your wisdom as insurance professionals with your clients.

Adam Mitchell is CEO of Mitch Insurance, a Whitby, Ont.-based insurance brokerage. This story is excerpted from one that appeared in the May print edition of Canadian Underwriter. Feature image by iStock.com/YakobchukOlena