Insurance agencies must do many things to ensure their business grows each year. These same activities can be used to help agencies identify areas that need improvement. Monitoring your quote volume is one of the best ways to track your business’ growth and pinpoint areas that are lacking.
Monitor your quote volume by looking at the quotes that your producers have provided over a period of time. To gain insight into trends and hot spots, you can break down the quotes into lines by producer, insurance company, or line by insurer.
Monitoring Quote Volume
You may see some cyclical trends when you start monitoring the volume of quotes. Insurance can be a seasonal product. You may see an increase in auto insurance quotes during tax return season. This is because more people are using their tax refund checks for vehicle purchases. The summer is a time when home insurance rates may rise. This is because many people move to avoid having to deal with Mother Nature’s obstacles while they move.
To identify economic changes that could impact your quote volume, you need to look beyond normal cycles. For example, although home and auto insurance rates may have declined between 2008 and 2009 respectively, certain tax credits granted in 2010 could have temporarily boosted the volume of quotes.
Compare the monthly quote volume for the most recent year with the previous year. You should keep in mind tax and economic changes and look for up- and down trends. You should also consider events that occurred in your office that could have had a positive or negative impact on the volume of quotes. You should also think about ads you have published in different outlets.
This data can be used to increase sales and expand on the work of your agency, but it is also useful for providing consistent customer service throughout the year. This data can be used to identify the busy seasons in your agency and help you increase staffing or streamline processing.
Advertising Volume and Quote Volume
You can now analyze your advertising results by comparing quotes month to month. You can further break down your data to see the number of quotes received for each advertising method and how many sales you made after you have given the quote.
Once you have an idea of how each campaign performed, you can start to think about who the target viewers were for the campaigns that failed and the ones that succeeded. What are the differences? Did you try to target a market that wasn’t open or didn’t match your prospect profile, and then fail?
Quote Volume by Product
If you look at the volume of quotes generated by your producers, at least for offices where they bring in their own leads to see which producers are meeting their goals and identifying the right type of prospects, you can identify which producers are able to attract people to your insurance lines.
Although quote volume is not an exact measure of prospect outreach or attempts, it can be a good indicator of who your office leaders really are. This creates an opportunity for your leaders to share their success stories. Producers who require additional guidance can do this in a meeting, or in small groups.
Quote Volume By Carrier
Your agency likely has multiple insurance carriers to offer clients the best products, best prices, and best service. It can be difficult to keep up with rate, guideline and company changes. This could mean that some companies are the “top” quoted while others remain in relative obscurity. It is important to determine why your quote volume seems heavily influenced by a handful of carriers. Ask your producers if they are aware of the issue. Many producers feel more comfortable selling to companies they know well.
In order to encourage your producers to quote more insurance companies, you’ll want to check if they offer any special incentives. You may not consider these carriers the preferred carrier for placing a majority of your business.
Sometimes, agency success and problems are overlooked by the volume of quotes. No matter what the case may be for your agency, this data is important to analyze and use to improve your closing rate, success rate, and process.