Customer Onboarding Process in Insurance: Full Guide

Trust and transparency are perhaps the two most important things for a positive customer experience in the insurance industry. The customer onboarding process in the insurance business plays a vital role in generating trust.

In the ideal scenario, an insurance customer will never make a claim – so the customer onboarding process in insurance may be the only moment to leave an impression and provide customer satisfaction. Based on this process, customers may judge your entire insurance agency and decide if they will renew their policy once it expires. Thus, a smooth onboarding experience gives you a competitive edge on the insurance market.

In this article, we explain what benefits insurance agencies should expect from a streamlined customer onboarding process and walk you through all the steps of developing a customer onboarding process for your agency.

What Is a Customer Onboarding Process in Insurance?

Customer onboarding in insurance is the process of welcoming new customers, explaining the intricacies of their policies, ensuring their ability to navigate an insurance company's offers and products, and providing ongoing support to facilitate their integration into the company's ecosystem.

Insurance client onboarding typically entails verifying customer information, setting up their accounts, educating them about available services and benefits, and making sure they have access to digital tools and resources for managing their policies effectively.

An effective customer onboarding process in insurance aims to build trust, enhance customer satisfaction, and lay the foundation for long-term customer relationships. A typical customer onboarding experience in insurance may look like this:

1. A customer contacts a sales rep and purchases an insurance policy.
2. The new insurance client receives a welcome call or email from the company with the introductory information and can schedule a call with an insurance agent.
3. During the call, an agent verifies the customer's information and requirements and offers additional products, changing policies, or other insurance services if they fit the customer's needs.
4. The agent also gives a detailed explanation of the terms, coverage, and benefits of the purchased policies and provides supplementary materials, such as guides and contact information for support queries.
5. If the insurance business utilizes an app or a digital client portal, an agent may help with digital onboarding and setting up the customer's account.
6. After the initial call, the company sends out regular follow-ups to address any concerns and gathers customer feedback to improve its operations.

This basic onboarding process can be further improved and built upon to maximize customer satisfaction. But before we lay out the guidelines for a world-class onboarding process in insurance, let's review its key goals.

Why is Customer Onboarding Important for the Insurance Industry?

This section lists the goals of the customer onboarding process in insurance and the benefits it brings if these goals are accomplished. Here's why your insurance company needs to establish a robust customer onboarding process.

To clear up the policy terms and conditions and mitigate misuse in the future

Choosing an insurance plan is a notoriously complicated process. For many customers, figuring out what insurance company to choose is already a tall task. They don't want to spend even more time browsing through hundreds of lengthy documents to find out the details and limitations of their own insurance policy.

An onboarding process aims to give all necessary information for customers to use their insurance correctly. After the onboarding process, new insurance clients should have a complete understanding of their terms and conditions, which safeguards you from policy misuse later. All in all, you save time both for the customers and your staff and ensure that a customer will have full transparency about what cases are covered by their policy.

To reduce operational costs

A comprehensive onboarding process helps your staff save time and optimize labor. If a customer possesses all the necessary knowledge of their policy, your other products, and your client portal, they are much less likely to contact customer support with questions and issues in the future.

Moreover, a great onboarding process will showcase your FAQs and guides, which can further eliminate the need to involve human agents to answer questions from a new client. This way, your customer service team can spend time on more challenging cases. Your agency can save resources spent on hiring more employees or paying higher fees for customer service automation software.

To learn more about the customer preferences

Connecting to customers immediately after the sale allows you to verify their information and go deeper into their life circumstances and motivations for getting insurance. Not only does it lead to a more personalized customer experience with a human touch, but it also enables you to cross-sell or upsell for certain customers. You may discover that there are packages or products that fit their requirements better than their current insurance coverage.

During the onboarding, an insurance agent may even provide a personalized experience by building a comprehensive insurance package to cover all customer needs for a new customer.

In some cases, an onboarding process gives you a chance to implement usage-based insurance that offers incredible flexibility to users, which contributes to higher customer satisfaction and retention.

Ultimately, using the onboarding process to learn more about the customers allows you to provide better services and get more profit by upselling and securing return business.

To gather feedback on sales or marketing activities

Onboarding also presents a chance to gather feedback on the customer journey so far and use it to improve your operations. You can ask how a customer found out about your company, their experience with your website, and their opinion on the sales process. This feedback will help you build more effective strategies and attract more new clients.

To encourage referrals and word-of-mouth marketing

People ask their friends to recommend them an insurance provider all the time. In the insurance industry, word-of-mouth marketing can be secured by providing a positive experience, which in no small part relies on a seamless onboarding process.

In addition to that, insurance providers can encourage referrals during the onboarding process when talking to customers. They may also consider using referral tools, such as ReferralCandy, to further support word-of-mouth marketing efforts. All in all, onboarding is a great opportunity to secure more business by providing excellent customer experience and encouraging recommendations.

7-Step Checklist For Insurance Customers' Onboarding Process

Chances are you already have an onboarding process in place and are looking to improve it. If there’s no formal customer onboarding process in your agency, there might be an uncoordinated algorithm of actions agents perform whenever a new customer comes on board.

In any case, this checklist will help you review and improve the customer onboarding process in your agency to ensure its efficiency.

Step 1. Map out the existing onboarding process

Firstly, you need to review your existing onboarding process and pinpoint the issues with the current process.

Ask agents what kind of complaints they get and what kind of problems they face. In addition to the internal review, you can gather and analyze customer feedback. Here are some examples of questions you can ask:

• How long does the application process take?
• Do customers find it hard to navigate your online portal?
• Do customers tend to ignore your requests for feedback?
• Do customers feel like they have a clear understanding of their policy after the onboarding call?

You can consult the goals of customer onboarding we mentioned above to see if your current process accomplishes them successfully. Make sure your onboarding workflow includes all the necessary steps listed in the first section of this article.

Note down the areas that need improvement and figure out what exactly causes the issues – is it the technology you’re using, the lack of training for the staff, or inaccessible explainers? As a result, you'll have a list of issues that prevent you from providing a positive onboarding experience.

Step 2. Build a digital infrastructure that supports customer onboarding

Your main tool for managing customer relationships, including the onboarding, is an insurance CRM. A customer relationship management platform helps you organize customer data and automate certain onboarding activities, such as going through the verification process, scheduling a call with an agent, sending a welcome package, sharing access to the knowledge library, gathering feedback, etc.

The CRM that streamlines the onboarding process must possess the following qualities:

• Support omnichannel communication, including in-app, email, and phone communication channels. According to McKinsey, six out of ten customers switch channels during the purchase stage, and we can assume they continue to do it after. The CRM of your choice needs to be a center of all customer communication.
• Integrate with a self-service app or website, aka client portal. Your CRM system needs to connect to the customer portal so you can analyze their behavioral data, log claims and requests in real-time, and update customer information. Some insurance CRM vendors already offer a customer portal as a part of their CRM package. Creatio stands out for giving you a unique opportunity to build your custom client portal with no-code tools that don't require any software development skills.
• Provide a knowledge base for your agents. Customers are not the only ones who require supplementary materials; agents often rely on explainers, guides, and FAQs as well. A well-organized knowledge base empowers your agents to provide the best onboarding experience by quickly sourcing relevant information.
• Provide native document management features or an integration with document management software allows you to design, approve, sign, and store contracts and agreements. A document management tool allows you to quickly consult a policy agreement or design a new one if you come across an up-selling opportunity while onboarding a new client.

By providing a self-service customer portal and automating routine tasks, you can save a lot of time and eliminate human errors.

Step 3. Update your onboarding content

Revise your educational materials and improve them according to the feedback from agents and customers. This refers both to the content used by customers and by insurance agents. Perhaps, you'll find that the guides you have are out of date, or the language they are written in is too complicated, or that customers prefer video guides rather than documents.

Keep the design and copy short and clear. Ensure customers understand your insurance policies during the onboarding activities without having to scroll through lengthy text. They need to know exactly what they are signing up for – and what they’re not.

Step 4. Train your staff

Once you have all the necessary tools and materials in place, you must make sure that insurance agents know how to use them. There are three things they need to master:

• The policies and services you offer;
• The software you're using, including the CRM system, the document management tools, and the self-service portal;
• And the protocols and rules on communicating with clients and handling sensitive issues.

The latter is extremely important because even though insurance onboarding doesn't occur during a client's crisis, you might still discuss sensitive issues, such as illness, death, or serious accidents. Therefore, your agents should be trained to talk about these things without disturbing new clients.

Step 5. Establish the process to gather feedback

Feedback is essential for understanding customer preferences, improving service delivery, and enhancing customer retention, which benefits both your clients and the business. You can use a variety of methods including surveys, one-on-one interviews, and customer journey mapping to understand customer experience so far and find areas of improvement.

Some of the best practices to gather feedback include:

• Collecting feedback at multiple stages of the onboarding.
• Guaranteeing anonymity and data protection.
• Designing questions that are specific, clear, and actionable.
• Using various channels (email, phone, self-service app, face-to-face) to reach customers in their preferred manner.
• Acknowledging feedback promptly and informing customers about actions taken as a result.

Step 6. Find ways to personalize customer experience

CRM automation enables you to collect customer's information and utilize it to make your interactions more personal.

During the insurance onboarding, you can divide customers into segments with the help of your CRM platform and continue to engage them, sending updates and materials relevant to their policy and preferences. From recommending policies and products based on their circumstances to providing targeted onboarding materials, there are countless opportunities to personalize their onboarding.

Step 7. Use automation to stay in touch

Once the customer's onboarding journey is over, it's crucial to maintain constant contact with them. Customer relationships should never be put on pause. Continue supporting your clients through consistent communication with reactive and proactive messages.

Check in with customers shortly after onboarding and see if they have any additional questions or requests. Going forward, you can use targeted marketing campaigns to inform customers about company news, discounts, policy adjustments, and more.

Creatio: Customizable Software for Insurance Agents

A CRM system should serve as a center of your operations and data, with all the customer interactions going through it. This means that your CRM platform of choice should be highly scalable, customizable, and should easily connect to other software in your toolkit.

CRM Creatio is highly customizable and equipped with industry-specific tools for insurance agencies, making it an excellent choice. It's an end-to-end platform based on a composable no-code architecture, which allows users to implement limitless customizations without any need for coding and programming. It ensures enterprise-grade scalability, allowing for seamless growth without disruptions.

A screenshot of a support agent desktop in Creatio

The CRM consists of three products - Sales, Marketing, and Service - addressing the entire customer lifecycle and streamlining relationships.

The platform leverages AI and machine learning to automate personalized marketing campaigns, manage leads, generate sales forecasts, and analyze performance. The recently introduced Creatio Copilot, a GenAI assistant, responds to natural language requests to build new apps, summarize analytics reports, suggest next actions, and more.

An example of Creatio Copilot in action

Creatio offers a comprehensive set of insurance-specific features, including:

• Underwriting and verification tools: Enable quick access to full insurance application data and streamline underwriting processes with flexible checklists and automated workflows.
• Document management: Keeps a well-organized, transparent document system.
• Claims lifecycle management: Supervises the entire claims lifecycle, from investigations to appraisals.
• Policy administration: Facilitates seamless, centralized management of policies.

Additionally, Creatio's Marketplace provides over 700 integrations, connecting to other software for billing, communication, and more.

Overall, Creatio is an excellent choice for an end-to-end insurance CRM, covering the entire customer journey and automating insurance-specific processes.

Discover how Creatio insurance CRM can optimize your onboarding process

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Streamline Customer Onboarding

Efficient customer onboarding in the insurance industry is crucial for clarifying policy terms, reducing operational costs, boosting customer retention, gathering feedback on sales and marketing, and encouraging referrals and word-of-mouth marketing. In the end, building an effective insurance onboarding procedure is easy, all you need is a detailed plan and robust software. Explore CRM Creatio's free trial to see how easy it is to provide excellent customer experience with the tools that support you.