Tips and Best Practices to Engage Your Insureds
October 6, 2021
In our last Actions & Insights blog post, we explained the importance of better engagement with your Insureds in order to increase the likelihood of their response, thus improving conversion and compliance rates and ensuring a positive insurance verification experience for all parties.
Evident’s Insurance Verification solution will help you achieve these goals quickly and efficiently by adhering to the engagement philosophy principles outlined below:
Branding and Contextual Relevance
Your emails need to be engaging. Insureds are more likely to respond to COI requests that appear to have been sent directly from your business, so it’s crucial that your branding is recognizable to your Insureds, especially if your company has multiple logos and/or brand colors, or if you’re using a DBA instead of a legal business name.
You should also consider the modality in which your Insureds will read the request notifications. For example, will they be in the field and read them on a mobile device, or will they read them from their office computer? Responsive emails are key, as these notifications will likely be opened on both desktop and mobile devices, and poor email formatting doesn’t render well on different devices. With our email templates, you can customize your emails without concern for these types of formatting issues.
Clarity
Also key to better engagement is avoiding ambiguity and embracing excessive clarity around both your insurance requirements and the insurance verification process, itself. This can be accomplished by sharing links to a detailed list of insurance requirements and sample COIs to help demonstrate your business’ specific insurance coverage needs.
It’s important to create one or more sample COIs, depending on the number of Insured groups that you have. For example, if all of your Insureds have identical sets of coverage requirements, then one sample COI would suffice. If your Insureds are categorized in distinct subgroups, each with differing requirements, then a unique sample COI should be created to represent each of these sets of needs. It’s critical to ensure that your sample COI(s) accurately reflect what is needed from your Insureds, because the Insured will send the sample COI to their Agent/Broker to help them understand what needs to be reflected on the COI.
It’s also essential that you provide your support contact information so that your Insureds can easily get in contact with you if they have questions regarding the insurance requirements, their compliance status, or the insurance verification process overall. Support contact information helps your Insureds avoid confusion and dead-ends.
When an Insured reads your request for COI submission, they should clearly understand what is needed from them, how to get help when questions arise, and how to close any gaps in insurance coverage they may have. For the latter, non-compliant notifications sent from our service contain explicit details about coverage gaps after submission so that the Insured knows exactly what needs to be rectified to get to a compliant state.
It also needs to be clear to the Insured how to request an exception to a requirement. You will likely have cases where an Insured doesn’t have one or more of the requested coverages because the value of their involvement with you doesn’t match the cost of obtaining the coverage.
Let’s say you’re a national waste hauling service provider and you have an Insured who hauls waste in a remote area or one who consistently totes fewer loads than your average hauler. In this scenario, the Insured might not feel like the cost to obtain certain coverage requirements is worthwhile for them, and they need to know how to effectively and efficiently communicate this back to you.
Automation, Notifications, and Reminders
Automation is at the core of Evident’s Insurance Verification solution, allowing you to “set and forget,” thereby reducing administrative overhead and burden. We do this in a number of ways, one of which is by providing three types of automated engagement with Insureds: new, non-compliant, and expiring. Having automated notifications that are specific to what is being requested from the Insured helps to keep engagement high, and engaged Insureds are more likely to respond faster to COI submission requests, ultimately leading to better results.
Notification reminders are also automated, and reminder cadences provide substantial value. They minimize touches with the Insured, offer the easiest and simplest path for Insureds to comply, and they help to remove objections and roadblocks.
Overly-aggressive reminders and incessant non-compliance notifications are unlikely to improve results, as your Insureds will likely become irritated by them, especially if these never-ending notices aren’t properly pathing them toward successful submission. One of the most powerful capabilities that Evident’s Insurance Verification solution offers is the ability to establish a reminder cadence that is suitable for your population of Insureds.
Our philosophy regarding reminders is that they should be targeted and only sent when needed (and executed automatically), be persistent (but not annoying), mirror best-of-breed marketing platforms by enabling a drip campaign, and stop once the Insured responds. To help achieve this, we utilize two different types of cadences: a standard, normal cadence with decreasing frequency of reminders, and a reverse cadence, reserved for expiration requests, which starts out with sparse notifications, and slowly increases the frequency of reminders as the expiration date nears in order to convey a sense of increasing urgency.
Default Settings
Evident has fine-tuned communications settings to optimize the outcomes as a result of learnings from hundreds of thousands of engagements. Some of the default settings we provide include: reminder cadences, quick help text, non-compliance text, and email template configuration.
Evaluation
The analytics and reporting capabilities that our Insurance Verification solution offers gives you the ability to measure the success of your Insured engagement so that you can learn and make adjustments, if needed, and have peace of mind knowing that nearly 25% of COI requests that commonly go unanswered won’t be a concern for your business, since you have Evident and our engagement philosophy working on your behalf.