Customer Service That Says I LOVE YOU!

Hey. Hey. Welcome back to the accelerate your insurance sales podcast. My name is Andy Neary, and this is episode six. In this episode, I am going to share three tips so that you can ensure your clients know that you love them. After all, it is Valentine's Day, and this is a story about love. You see, just like on Valentine's day, you can't show up one day of the year and think you've done your job. So your significant other knows, hey, I love you. You should be loving on them every day of the year. And customer service is no different. You may think it's table stakes, but I'm here to tell you more. Business is won or lost in the insurance industry because of customer service or a lack of. And if you think customer service is returning calls and emails and showing up for about 45, 60 days of the year to do the renewal, you are falling short, my friend. In this episode, I'm going to share three tips to take your customer service over the top so your clients never talk to somebody else again. All right, let's tune in. Three tips on how to ensure your clients know you love them and three tips to ensure your clients never leave for another broker. Here we go. Let's dive in. Hey. Hey. Happy Valentine's Day. Yes, it is the day of love. February 14th. Episode 6 is all about giving your clients a little love. Today is a Valentine's Day episode special. I will not be sharing any tips on how to make your significant other feel special, but I am going to be sharing a few tips on how to make your clients feel special. You know, this episode was greatly influenced by a podcast Amy and I were listening to last week podcast we often listen to called the Married game. And the couple on the episode were talking about Valentine's Day and how guys in particular feel that they can show up for the one day of the year, make their significant other feel awesome and they're good for the rest of the year. And you and I both know that's not the case. Your job is to make it feel like Valentine's Day every day, right? And it got me thinking.

How often do we think all we have to do in showing up for our clients is to show up a few times throughout the year and we're good. They know we love them, right? But you and I both know that is not the case yet. We're going to talk about customer service today and I know you think it is a boring table stakes topic. However, I'm here to tell you more. Business is won or lost because of customer service or a lack of, you can try to sell any innovative strategy you want. In the insurance industry, if the service sucks, nothing else matters. If you save a client 30% on insurance cost through your innovation but your service sucks, they quickly forget about how much money you saved them. So yeah, customer service matters. And we're going to talk about how to love on your clients today, how to ensure that they feel like it's Valentine's Day every day with you. Now, if you think customer service is answering calls when your clients call in or answering an email when it's in the inbox and showing up for those 45 to 60 days, it's called renewal time. You're falling very far short of what is good customer service. That is not customer service that says I love you. That's customer service that says, you know, we're just doing enough to keep you.

Now I do have to talk about the elephant in the room too. The sad thing in the insurance industry is our clients expectations are not very high. I was having a conversation a couple of years ago with some peers and we were talking about the fact you could literally do nothing for your clients and you had still retain probably 80% of them and. But that's not what this episode is about. I'm going to, I'm going to help you go above and beyond customer service and I'm going to help you. I'm going to share three strategies, three tips that are going to help you create customer service that says I love you. So let's just dive right into it. Tip number one, set clear expectations. Now, what I'm about to share with you over the next 5, 10 minutes here comes from my time as an account executive at an organization that I was with in Wisconsin, the Burke Walden Associates. Dan Burkwald was one of my first mentors. But it was at Burkwald and Associates I learned the true meaning of customer service and what it meant to have dialed in service expectations. We had one process that we ran for every single client and it was dialed in. It was clear so that if we ever lost an account exec or account manager, it was next man up because we followed one process. So a lot of what I'm about to share comes directly from my time at Burke Walton Associates. Dan, if you're listening, I owe you for this episode. But the first tip to ensure your clients know you love them is to set clear expectations. Expectations.

Do your clients know what to expect from you? I would argue for most agencies the answer is no because your your service is Inconsistent. Sometime throughout the year, you are over the top, you're holding their hand, and at other times they barely hear from you. There's no consistency. The other challenge I see for a lot of agencies is there has. There has been no delineation between what your clients get as service, depending on their size or the amount of revenue they generate for you. I see a lot of agencies who give the same amount of time and hand holding to a 20 life group as they do a 200 life group or a commercial agency given the same amount of handholding to a $10,000 revenue account as they do a hundred thousand dollars. And you should not be giving the level, the same level of service to all clients. You can challenge me on that, but I know it to be true, especially if you're going to scale a successful, profitable business. Because I'm here to tell you, if you believe you need to be handholding your smaller clients, you are losing money on them. And you have also set a very new expectation with them that you cannot maintain if you're doing too much hand holding for your smaller groups, for your smaller clients, they have now come to expect it. This was a challenge we often ran into at Burke Walton Associates. Sometimes we would set such a high bar, it became the new standard our clients had for us. So that if we didn't maintain our own bar that we set to them, it looked like we had started to fall short, even though we were still giving them a level of service that was three or four times better than they've ever had. We set our own standard. We became our own enemy. But you have to set clear expectations. What are your clients going to expect from you when it comes to service? Number one, you need to sit down and you need to figure out what your clients get based on their size. Yes, you need to tier out each client based on size and you need to set a clear expectation of service that they're going to get as a result of how big they are. Small groups, they're going to get a certain level of service, but they're not going to get the same level of service as your big groups are. At Burke Wall, if you had a more than 100 lives, you were going to get four quarterly meetings from us. But if you were under 100 lives, you were not going to get four quarterly meetings, you were going to get two. And if you were under 50 lives or under 25, you were probably only going to get one check in from us. We set a very clear standard for what you could expect from us. And if you didn't like it, you probably weren't a fit for us, and that's okay. But you have to have clear expectations. Too many agencies have inconsistent expectations. Therefore, your clients do not know what to expect from you. So if you want to create service that says I love you, make sure your clients know exactly what they can expect from you. Tip number two, over communicate. Now, this tip comes directly from a recent conversation I had with a client of mine. This is a very sizable agency that just lost a very large employee benefits client last year. And the reason they lost it was because of a lack of communication. At least that's my opinion. You see, this client of theirs had a president who was a disengaged president, meaning he had decision making capability. However, he never participated in the meetings our client had with them. And all it took was for him to have another side conversation with another broker who talked about an idea, a topic which by the way, our client is known for. And it opened the door to let the other broker in. And lo and behold, they took the account away from our client, which caused a pretty big dent in revenue. It was a bad loss. In fact, it was their largest property and casualty client.

And so when I think about how to create a service model that says I love you, you have to over communicate with your clients. And this involves varying degrees of communication. Let's start with the example I just gave. If our client had over communicated with their client throughout the year, meaning kept the president in the loop even if he wasn't participating in the meetings, that side conversation probably would have never happened.

So when we were at Burke Wald, here was our way to solve that. As an account exec, it was my job after every strategy session to send out a set of meeting notes within 48 hours. Now let me explain this. When I say meeting notes, I am not talking about a long drawn out email with a bunch of bullet points. That's not meeting notes. This was an actual PDF we had built, branded to our clients, colors and logo, and it looked very professional. And it was my job to send out that meeting note 48 hours within 48 hours of that strategy session. Now, it was who I sent it to that mattered. You see, when I would send out the meeting notes to everybody, everybody in that organization that had any kind of decision making power would get cc'd on that email. Because even though they didn't participate in the meeting, we wanted them to know exactly what was talked about, what action items came out of the meeting. So we kept everybody in that organization on the same page, yeah, it was definitely a cover your ass situation. However, that was how we kept all decision makers in the loop whether or not they choose to engage in the strategy sessions. So that's what I'm going to encourage you to do. What are you doing to make sure you are communicating with all parties involved, whether or not they are actually participating directly in the meetings with you. Over communicate. Now the second type of over communication I want you to think about is how are you communicating with your clients on a daily basis to handle their what I would call routine issues and fires that they reach out to you for help on. I see a lot of agencies who get a request from a client that requires them to go find an answer or go to somebody who has the answer and they don't reply to that email or the phone call until they have the answer. So three, four, five days could go by before they actually reply to the client because now they have, they finally have an answer. And here's the issue. You may have thought there was no reason to reach back out to the client because you didn't have an answer for them yet all the while they're sitting on the other end of that phone or email going where the hell are you? Are you even working on this? A simple, hey, just so you know, I don't have an answer for you yet, but I'm expecting you or I'm expecting an answer within the next day or two. I'm going to keep you posted is all it would have taken. All you're doing is keeping the client in the loop. They're good now. They know they have clear expectations and everybody's happy. Now if they're not happy with the response or the timeliness, they'll let you know. But you are at least over communicating with them and letting them know where you are at even when you do not have an answer. We actually had a rule at Burkwall that was called the sunset rule. If I received an email or a phone call from our client within the same day, I had to provide an email back or a call back to acknowledge I received their call or email. Even if I didn't have an answer, I had to acknowledge that I had received the call of the email. Why? That lets our client know we're on it. So over communicating is one about keeping all parties involved at your client so everybody's on the same page. So you don't allow another broker to come in and talk with one of the C suites executives who's not involved. And number two, over communicating with your clients, always keeping them in the loop. Whether or not you have a solution or an answer to their inquiry is massively important.

Because this will leave a lasting impression on your client. An impression that says, these people care. These people love us. This is what creates client stickiness. These little things go a long way. Which leads me to my final tip. Tip number three, are you aware of the impression that you are creating with your client? Hey, it's Andy Neary. Thank you for listening to the Accelerate your insurance podcast. Did you know the ideas we share on the show are things we actually specialize in helping you implement? If you want to increase your sales, make more money, and be the thought leader your prospects, reach out to, please go to my LinkedIn profile DM me and sign up for a free discovery call. Again, go to my LinkedIn profile DM me and we'll get you set up for a free discovery call. All right, now back to the show. You might be doing your job, you might be answering phone calls and emails, but are you aware of the impression you are actually creating with your client? Let me give you an example. Think about the time you lost a client. I'm sure it's happened at some point and you were dumbfounded to learn that you were losing the business to another competitor. You actually did nothing wrong. You provided really good service. In fact, the client may even have said, it's nothing you did. We've just made the decision to go elsewhere and you're wondering, how in the hell did this happen? I guarantee it was simply because your client had an impression of you that you were unaware of. Maybe it was, hey, are these guys big enough to handle our account anymore? It's a very common problem with growing companies. They think they outgrow their broker. Or maybe it's something they saw online that just gave them that hint of doubt that you have the ability and the credibility to serve them. And what I want to talk about in talking about tip three, the impression.

I want you to audit your team's LinkedIn presence.

After this episode, I want you to go look at your team's LinkedIn presence, whether it's your producers all the way. I hate to say down because I'm thinking hierarchically here, but your producers, your account manager, your account execs, anybody who might be involved in touching a client, and I want you to audit their profiles. Does their profile say this is a dialed in professional organization? I would be willing to bet it's not the case. You see, what I see often at agencies is the Producers, the ones out selling their LinkedIn profile, dialed in looks good, right? We teach them how to do it. Then you go look at the account execs and the account managers and yeah, they're just kind of half ass created. There's no banner, they got 23 connections. It looks like they're barely ever on the platform. If you don't think that is leaving a lasting impression on your comp, on your prospects or your clients, you're wrong. You're making a big mistake. So the third tip in creating customer service that tells your clients these folks love me is actually by creating a good impression.

The first two tips will absolutely create a good impression, will absolutely let your clients know you love them. But how your team is presented online, whether it be on your website or on LinkedIn, says a lot about what your clients think of you. So I ask you to go audit your team's LinkedIn profiles. I ask you to go audit your website. Does your team appear on the website, not just the executives, because it goes a long way in building credibility while you sleep. And it can help you or it can hurt you.

My goal with today's episode is to ensure a client never cheats on you again.

They never go dating other brokers because they know the one that they're in bed with. Sorry for the horrible pun, loves the living hell out of them. So if you take these three tips, you set clear expectations with your clients.

You over communicate with them at all times so everybody is on the same page, especially when there are disengaged decision makers and you ensure in audit that your team's online profile is dialed in and looks professional, you are going to create a ton of client stickiness. Now I'm going to end by giving sharing something I want you to consider on February 27th. Speaking of, is your team's LinkedIn presence dialed in? I am actually hosting a webinar with Jen Walsh. You may know who Jen is. She does some fabulous work with account exec teams, account managers. She and I are hosting a webinar on February 27. The registration link is in the show notes and we are going to talk about how to use LinkedIn to build your clients confidence in your team. We're going to talk about tip number three. We're going to go into detail on how to do it, some of the mistakes to avoid, you're going to want to be there, especially if you want your team's presence to be dialed in. So if you're a sales director, you're an agency owner, you oversee a team. You're going to want to be on that webinar. It's February 27th. The details are in the show notes, the link below. Go check it out. Get signed up. Get your team signed up. You're not going to want to miss it. But hey, if you want to build a customer service process that that absolutely tells your client you love them, please follow these three things. Set clear expectations over, communicate with them all the time, and make sure your online presence supports the credibility you want to create with your clients. Other than that, for my guys on this episode, please make sure today you're doing everything you can to let your significant other know you love them. But make sure this isn't the only time of the year you're showing up. You should be doing this week in and week out. With that, I'm going to say Happy Valentine's Day and go build a process that tells your clients you love them. That's all we got for this episode of the Accelerate your insurance Sales podcast. One of the most valuable things you can do to help us and other new potential listeners find our show is for you to rate the show and leave a review. So as a special bonus for you if you leave us a review, take a screenshot of your review and and send it to me as a DM to my LinkedIn profile. I will send you a free copy of our LinkedIn Diamond Playbook, our proven four step strategy to grow your business on LinkedIn. So go right now, leave us a review, screenshot it and send me a DM on LinkedIn. Also, please share this podcast with anyone you think would enjoy it. That's it for now.