For the insurance companies, cost of customer acquisition is very high, Insurance companies use media related promotions to generate interest as well as awareness of life insurance requirements, Managing the leads generated through such promotions and various other channels and converting potential leads into relationships is important.
Insurance companies are competing to attract customers for bying insurance policies. Marketing teams too are spending huge monies on advertising campaigns to generate leads. SMS is one channel where customrs can easily get in touch with insurance companies to know about their products.
Currently the lead management process is lengthy. It is not uncommon to see adertisements, saying SMS "LIFE" to a number to know about an insurance product.
After the customer sends SMS, it take a lot of time (more than couple of weeks in some cases) for the insurance company to get back to the customer. In the era of instant communication, this causes frustration and potential loss of business to the insurance company.
To worsen the situation, the leads are never qualified. When SMS is sent to the insurance company, the only qualification is done around location of the customer, in many cases the lead is just forwarded to insurance agents in the respective locations for them to carry it forward.
In absense of any information about the lead, agents have to just pursue leads in whatever order they prefer. Insurance companies need solutions which will:
- Help them qualify the leads better
- Expedite the process of lead management. Some live communication should be made between the insurance company and the customer soon after he shows interest
- Allocate leads to agents on a near to real time basis so that the agents can capitalize on the customers' mindshare and close the leads
- Update the centralized system on the status of the lead and request for pre-sales support if required
Avaya can address this challenge of delay in servicing a lead by integrating its outbound dialing solutions with lead management solution.
As soon as the lead is generated in form of SMS from potentical customer, it is routed to the team of insurance professionals (call center agents) in near real time.
Moreover, integrating the outbound solution with the SMS server of the insurance company enables the agent to speak to customer while the lead is hot and ask the necessary questions before qualifying the customer as opportunity for the product.
The customer's business applications can also be integrated with Field Force Automation systems which can SMS the leads to the selected agents in an encrypted format.
The lead will only open on the client applications installed on the agent's mobile. Agents can also update the centralized business application on the status of the lead after their visit.
