Taking Customer Communications to a New Level

A 2021 ICTA nomination

Toronto, ON (Mar. 30, 2021) – Traditional Broker Management Systems (BMS) have limited customization, built on older, manual processes and are often costly to implement and scale. The Ai Insurance Organization developed our customizable BMS/CRM solution in 2015 to replace our traditional BMS system and improve efficiencies for client and policy lifecycles. We continue to grow through innovation in 2021.

Our lead management system is the starting point of our CRM. The cloud-based CRM is built on an open-source, modular platform and connects through our custom API with PowerBroker for the exclusive purpose of EDI uploads and downloads. Our integration with QuickBooks provides us with a stand-alone account system that gives us real-time profit-loss, balance sheet, AR, AP and budget actuals. Compared to what is in the marketplace today, we see this as a huge advantage.

Our task management and automated activity notification features assist our brokers with prioritizing daily and weekly workloads, including lead follow up, renewal processing and policy amendments. Express quoting solutions with our premium financing partners are fully integrated into the CRM as well and provide a one-step process for our producers at point-of-sale, including automated broker disclosures as required by regulation.

The management team meets on a weekly basis to review project statuses, deadlines and results while adjusting and improvements, as necessary.

The addition of a full-fledged, in-house marketing team in 2020, and the investment in Act-On, a true marketing automation and communication platform, signaled the necessary investment to compliment the technology and sales team’s efforts.

Our CRM syncs with Act-On to allow our marketing team to produce tailored communications, utilizing client data for onboarding, cross-selling and renewal processes. When a lead is generated in the CRM from an external landing page, it automatically signals Act-On to send out a ‘thank you for submitting your request’ email, along with links to current blog articles that may be of interest.

Simultaneously our CRM cycles the lead through (customizable) pre-defined routing queues in 3-minute intervals, on a round-robin basis. Routing queues are designed by target class which ensures leads are assigned to our producers according to their area of expertise. Once the lead is accepted, the producer has a maximum of sixty seconds to respond to the request, before the lead moves to the next producer in queue. Creating a sense of urgency ensures immediate action and a timely response for all leads.

In conjunction with the above, our CRM triggers a secondary Act-On email, in the event of a delayed producer assignment stating, ‘it’s taking us a bit longer than expected to get back to you, please click this link to book a call back time at your convenience.’

Web generated leads are tracked in real time by campaign, target class and much more, to measure lead generation ROI.

Once a lead converts to a customer in our system, Act-On sends the customer a welcome series of five emails over the course of two weeks for onboarding, cross selling, and testimonial purposes.

We also reach out to lapsed customers weeks and months in advance of their X-date to restart the conversation, and try to win back their business, thanks to data that is cross-pollinated to Act-On from the CRM.

After brokers experienced our single platform’s efficiencies, they quickly changed their mindset and understood the value of embracing our new online/technology-driven culture.

We ensured these successes would continue through ongoing training, system update notifications, dedicated troubleshooting, and technical support. We achieved successful adoption because it was a top-down approach. We avoided many of the obstacles associated with implementing new technology through clearly defined objectives and key results across all levels of the organization. All plans were documented, timelines were assigned and signed off by management through Asana. The technology was only implemented when all parties were comfortable adopting it.

We continually assess innovative solutions to accelerate our growth, improve our service and increase client retention.

This pandemic has demonstrated the ROI in the digitization of our brokerage and IT infrastructure with the seamless transition to a remote working environment. We are currently developing new modules which, when released will aid our team and our surety clients with faster, self-service processing.

As technology and the digital landscape of the insurance industry continues to evolve, we aim to make adapting to change effortless while continuing to deliver on the value proposition for both our clients and insurance markets.

Benefits

By building our own system, Ai Insurance Organization mitigated escalating licensing fees and industry technology consolidation. Our platform costs are primarily associated with ongoing development and maintenance, and we have no monthly licensing fees.

In addition to the financial impacts and benefits, perhaps the most significant benefit to the business was the successful cultural shift from a traditional brokerage to an online technology-driven digital brokerage. Although some segments of our business are still managed the traditional way, our focus is on digital.

This unfortunate pandemic has demonstrated the true value in the digitization of our brokerage and IT infrastructure with the seamless transition to a remote working environment. We are currently developing new modules which, when released will aid our team and our clients with faster, self-service processing.

Considerable time was invested to educate our entire team and assist them in understanding the reasons why a cultural shift towards digital was imperative to our success.

Our most recent results from 2020 show that our automated system contributed to an increase in close ratio of 340%, an increase in gross written premium by 41% and our ROI from advertising increased by 82% from the previous year.

About Ai Insurance Organization Inc.

Ai Insurance Organization Inc. is an award-winning Canadian Insurance Brokerage located in Mississauga, Ontario. We proudly serve clients all over Canada (except for Quebec and the Territories). We are Canada’s leading surety bond broker and contractor insurance provider. Our surety bonding programs service companies of all sizes; from start-ups to tenured companies, including Fortune 500. Our clients include contractors and construction companies from all industry sectors, transportation firms, estates, financial institutions and those with miscellaneous and hard-to-place bonding requirements. We also have international surety bonding capabilities. Our surety partners are the best the industry has to offer, and are chosen specifically to meet your individual needs. Together, we are committed to provide sound counsel and deliver continuity of experience and consistency of service. Our brokerage is committed to delivering the utmost in customer service and is well informed on changing risk appetites and industry trends. Together, we are in the best position to negotiate the most competitive rates, terms and limits on your behalf.

For more information, visit getcertain.ca.

Source: Ai Insurance Organization Inc.

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