Situation: Auto and Home insurer with captive agents achieving sub-optimal close rates on aggregated internet leads due to poor lead quality and duplicate leads. Agent and prospect satisfaction low. In addition, insurer under price pressure from supplier looking to raise costs 30-50%.
Task: Figure out a way to improve lead quality, agent and customer experience, while keeping price increases at a minimum.
Actions:
1) Working with the Analytics group, developed an Internet Lead model that identified those leads most likely to purchase. As a result, the insurer was able to eliminate the bottom 10-20% of leads from purchase consideration, ensuring the agents received a greater share of leads they could close and reducing wasted resources on chasing down leads that had no chance of closing.
2) Identified and hired two third parties to consolidate the purchasing of leads. Goal was to dedupe leads coming in from many different vendor partners, so partners could not attempt to sell the same lead to the client company multiple times. In addition, the insurance company started to compare leads to their customer list and individuals recently quoted, reducing waste and ensuring efficiencies at the agent offices. Also validated lead information, rejecting leads with insufficient contact info, thus saving agents more time. Reduced chance of over contacting prospects, and of one agent contacting customers of another.
3) The third parties enabled the insurer to grow more aggregator relationships, reducing dependencies on just a few suppliers, creating flexibility in the buying process,ensuring leads could be purchased at only the optimal cost per sale or quote benchmarks, and minimizing the pricing pressure applied by suppliers. Insurance company was able to resist price increases.
4) Conducted A/B testing to identify the most effective lead nurture messaging and cadence.
5) Worked proactively with Sales Management to develop process and training for agents. Also introduced a tiered co-op pricing model to improve agent performance.
Results: The insurer doubled their close rates on Internet Leads, substantially reducing cost per sale.