In the current advanced market of connected customers, your online presence is key to your insurance agency’s success. Along with your social network profiles, websites, and blogs, positive client reviews are a vital determining factor for your company’s success. Collecting insurance agency reviews is among the most effective strategies for attracting more potential customers.

This short-read covers the importance of these useful insights and the best practices for collecting reviews and improving customer experience.

Why You Should Start Collecting Insurance Agency Reviews

In the same way you head to Google when looking for a new pizza place, people moving to your city or looking for a better agent are heading straight to Google.

Generating positive public reviews is critical for every business, especially local businesses. Think about it. We’re being programmed to rely on reviews for every purchase we make and every company we decide to do business with. Every time you look for something on Amazon, consider a new Netflix series to binge, or when finding the right app on your phone, you look at the reviews first.

So if you want to make sure you’re attracting a younger audience, it’s time to put a little emphasis on your online presence. This means Google.

So how do you begin collecting reviews for your insurance agency?

Make a Plan

It’s probably best to think through how this will work for your insurance agency instead of going all willy-nilly and randomly asking for reviews. Two things are true if you’re going to do this with any type of consistency.

  1. You have to get your team on board
  2. You need a process that makes it easy

Using the Shortened Link That GMB Provides

Collecting reviews on Google My Business is relatively easy. First, you have to set up your listing. If you haven’t done this yet, check out our intro article that will walk you through it here.

Google My Business makes it easy to share your review link without having to coach your clients on where to go. They provide a short URL that can be copied and sent easily by text message or email. This link will take your client straight to the review page so they can quickly tap 5 stars and leave a comment.

Rule #1 when asking your clients for something: Make it Easy.

Deciding When and How to Ask

Timing and approach are everything. Even if you’re confident that you’ve offered the best experience to your customers, it’s still important to ask for feedback in the right way and at the appropriate time. For an insurance agent, there are a couple of prime opportunities to get positive feedback and send it to Google.

  1. Right after the sale – The first experience your new client has with your agency is handled during the sales process. This is also one of the best times get feedback and send it to Google. Once the deal is done, your client isn’t thinking about insurance anymore and will be far less likely to leave you a positive review.
  2. After a service request – When your service team knocks it out of the park for a client, you have a great opportunity to turn a great experience into a shared experience.

Train Your Team

For this to work, your team needs to be on board. So just like with your clients, you need to make it easy and build it into your workflows. Have the team set expectations by phone or email so your client knows they’ll be receiving a link to leave a review. This is an easy mention on a call.

Create a templated email and SMS that the team can easily copy/paste and send in less than 10 seconds.

Some insurance agencies have found success with short-term campaigns and incentives. The only downside to this is keeping the momentum going after the campaign ends but it can create a nice boost in reviews in a short period of time.

Avoid Negative Reviews

Nothing is worse than the gut-punch of a negative Google review for your insurance agency. It’s tough to predict one if you aren’t the only person interacting with customers but there is a way to avoid negative reviews while still giving your customers the opportunity to leave feedback, good or bad.

It’s all about the survey.

This is the secret sauce that Renew King uses to generate hundreds of positive reviews on Google while giving your insurance agency the opportunity to hear negative feedback and do something about it BEFORE it gets posted publicly.

We send super simple surveys to every new client by email and SMS right at the close of a sale. This can be completely automated, too. We drive positive feedback to Google and negative feedback to a landing page where the customer can leave more information for you, allowing you to right the experience.

Getting customer feedback with a survey is the perfect proactive step in creating a positive experience for your new clients. And we can put the whole process on autopilot while you focus on closing deals and providing great service.

To learn more about Renew King and see for yourself how this works, check out the Renew King demo.