Archive for the ‘AgencyIQ News’ Category
Why Aren’t You Closing On Leads?
Increase Sales
Think about your selling style. Do you overwhelm the prospect with your company’s credentials, your credentials, never take a breath between questions or truly listen to the answers? One of the hardest things to learn in sales is the power of silence! How many times has someone “talked” a customer out of sale…. In my experience, far too many! Review these thoughts and see if they help your close ratios.
- Provide Value – don’t focus the discussion on the “features”, yes they are important, but spend more time discussing why your services add value, meet a specific need of the client and benefit them by doing business with you.
- Listen to Your Lead – ask a question and “really listen” to their response before you start formulating your response in anticipation of what you “think” the customer is going to say, they may surprise you! We have only ONE mouth and TWO ears for a reason…. Use them accordingly.
- Stop Talking About Yourself – the lead is not really interested that you are a top producer, #1 in your Division, or in the President’s club. They want to know what you can do for them and help meet their needs in the most cost effective means. Focus on them; people like to hear their name and talk about themselves, you’ll learn a lot about them if you give them a chance.
- Review Your Lead Providers – if you buy online leads, review the close ratios by lead provider on regularly scheduled intervals. Look at bounce percentages, watch for stale lists and see who is giving you the higher ROI.
- Mine Your Database – you’ve invested time, money and resources to generate leads, so don’t give up on them too early. Take a long term approach to earning their business. Using a drip email campaign program like AgencyIQ will keep you in front of the lead on a consistent, long term basis. Using AgencyIQ’s powerful, customizable drip email system is an automated, cost effective tool that will help you improve your ROI and conversion ratios on those valuable leads.
Give AgencyIQ a call and let us help you get the most out of your leads and increase your close ratios!
Automated Reminders Are Here!
We are excited to introduce new features with reminders that we think you’ll find pretty useful. Not only have we improved the interface for creating and managing reminders, but we’ve added the ability to schedule reminders automatically as a part of your workflow configuration for your agency.
Changes Within Reminders
Each reminder now contains a reminder type, allowing you to classify your reminders into configurable categories. The reminder type contains defaults of “call”, “appointment”, and “to do”, but you can easily customize your reminder types to add to this list. Simply visit the Lists tab under “Agency Settings, and select the “Agency-wide Lists” section. There you will see a list for reminder types and you can create your own types.
By selecting a type on your reminders, you can easily sift thru your reminders on the dashboard by using the new “type” selector at the top of the Reminders tab. Once you begin using reminder types, this drop-down will appear, allowing you to narrow the reminders listed to those of a given type. Want to see all your reminders for calls? It’s a snap.
Select a Reminder Type to narrow the list of reminders displayed
Also note that there is a new “Daily” option for listing all your appointments and reminders for a given day chronologically. This is useful if you’re working your call list for today, for example.
Automating Reminders
You can now set up new workflow actions that automatically set reminders, just as you can trigger autoresponders. Add the reminder in the action section of your workflow rule by selecting reminder from the Add Action drop-down, in the bottom left-hand corder of the actions section. You can add one or several reminders to suit your needs.
If you’re triggering actions based on a status change, remember that you may have other reminders set based on other workflow rules that had previously fired. You might want to start your actions off by issuing the action to cancel previously scheduled reminders which will, in essence, wipe the slate clean. Then you can add one or more reminders for the new status.
Don't forget to cancel previously scheduled reminders
We think you’ll find the improvements to reminders an enhancement to your workflow. Let us know what you think!
Email Open Notification
Many have asked for it, and now we’ve delivered. Introducing Email Open Notification!
Email Open Notification is a way to be notified (passively or actively) when an email that you’ve sent to a prospect was opened in their email client. We’ve even extended notifications in AgencyIQ to be able to alert you on your cell phone via SMS text message when a prospect opens your email message, so that you can place a call right then and there and reach them when your pitch is top of mind.
First, a note of caution: We cannot accurately tell you if the prospect you emailed actually read your message. We also cannot tell you if they didn’t. We can’t accurately tell you if your message was marked as spam, or for other reasons was never opened. The technology of email just can’t do that reliably; the protocols that make up the email infrastructure on the Internet just don’t provide it. Any vendor that tells you they can is clouding reality.
On the other hand, if you receive notification that an email you sent was opened, you can be (reasonably) sure that it was actually opened. You see, the way this works is we place a tiny invisible image at the bottom of each email message sent. When the recipient’s email system displays your email message on their screen, their email system will come back to our server to get the invisible image. This image won’t alter the look of your email (it’s transparent and only a single pixel in size). However, when we serve this image up, we can record the open of the email message.
Now, if the email recipient uses a text-only email reader (which doesn’t support images), or has their email client set to not download images automatically, we can’t register the open. So make sure you’re approaching this from the right perspective: how many opens you got, not how many you didn’t.
How do I see opens?
Everywhere in AgencyIQ where a list of sent emails are shown you can see the open status of your email. Just look for the small open envelope.
Notifications Tab under "My Settings"
This indicates that the email message you sent has been opened by the recipient. If you hover your mouse over the envelope, a small pop-up will show you the date and time that the email was opened. If you want even more detail, simply open the message and look at the bottom for the “Open Log”. This will list every time the email was opened. Note, we only register “opens” that are at least 10 minutes apart, since some email clients redraw their screens many times and this would lead to an inflated recording of opens.
How can I be notified immediately when a prospect opens my email?
This comes in two steps. First, you need to set up your notification address. This is an email address that the system will send a notice to when an email you’re particularly interested in is opened.
We’ve revised and simplified the notification setup, on the Notifications tab under “My Settings.”
Check this box to receive notification when the email is opened
We’ve broken out the various types of notifications you can receive, and provided separate settings for each one. You can set the specific email address as well as a window of time where you want to receive these types of notifications. We’ve also provided a checkbox to temporarily disable a particular type of notification, if you’d like.
The idea here is to send the message to your smartphone, via SMS text message. All major cell phone carriers have an email interface that allows you to send an email directly to your phone, which they will convert to a SMS text message and send to you. If you click the little “+” icon below the notification fields, we provide instructions to send SMS text messages to the cell phones of most major US carriers. Make sure your cell phone plan supports text messaging and that you’re aware of the rates your cell phone carrier will charge for sending and receiving text messages before using this feature.
Enter your information here, and use the “test” link to send a test message to make sure everything is working properly.
Once you have the notification address set up for your account, you’ll need to specify that you want to be notified when an email is opened.
When composing an email message (either as an individual email message or as an autoresponder email), you have the ability to check the box “notify me when this email is opened.” Checking this box on an email you send will tell the system to send a message to the notification email address you provided in “My Settings” when this email is first opened. In the case of autoresponders, the notification will be sent to the agent who is currently assigned to the contact that the email was sent to.
Check this box to be notified when an Email is opened
That’s it! We hope you find this great new feature useful!
Staying Relevant As An Agent
Success
Survey results from an online insurance comparison site CoverHound.com indicate that consumers of auto insurance still prefer to deal with local agents versus online or telephone purchases from direct carriers. While direct carriers continue to gain market share, shoppers still prefer that personal connection. That’s great news for agents!
The survey shows that 39% prefer to deal with a local agent, 32% prefer direct contact with carriers and 29% are indifferent. Not surprisingly, 50% of 18-25 year olds preferred a direct carrier association, while only 27% of 41-50 year olds held a similar preference. As an agent, this provides some valuable insights into market demographics and should assist you in defining your marketing strategy. Utilizing online technology should be an important part of you marketing plan. Having a presence online is crucial to reaching a significant percentage of the market, regardless of age, but is essential to reach the younger age demographic. By making contact in an environment clients are comfortable in, you make yourself available to begin the process of developing a lifelong relationship. Reality is, the younger age demographic will probably have less extensive insurance needs early in the relationship, but as they mature, their insurance needs will increase to keep pace with larger homes, more expensive cars, life insurance policies, and health care needs. Branding yourself as a valuable resource that will assist a client with wealth retention and protecting them from loss from young adulthood will create a steady, reliable income stream potential.
The use of online technology by consumers will only continue to grow in the next ten years and beyond. Position yourself NOW to be an active participant with your potential clients online. If you haven’t already done so, take a look at what AgencyIQ can do to assist you with our online program. Our customizable software and drip email marketing campaigns will assist you in growing you business!!
Updated Reports
Now agents can track their sales and activities easier than ever. We’ve updated two reports, the Lead Source Summary Report and the Lead Source Detail Report, and we’ve added the Agency Activity Report.
Lead Source Summary and Detail Reports
This report shows you how many leads you’ve received from each source during a given date range. In addition to the raw numbers, a graph is also produced that visually compares these different lead sources to each other.
In this update, we added the ability to narrow down leads assigned to individual agents, as well as to show close ratios across these lead sources. By checking the box “Show Breakdown By Class” (circled in red in the screenshot below) and clicking “Refresh,” the report will expand to show Prospect vs. Client (and Cancelled) contacts. We show both the raw numbers as well as the percentage breakdown.
Lead Source Summary Report
As before, if you click on any of the detail numbers inside the report, you’ll be taken to the Lead Source Detail Report, showing you all the contacts that roll up to that number. On this detail report, we’ve expanded the selection criteria to allow you narrow down by Agent(s) and Class, and we’ve added a column to show you the last date that an email was sent to this contact.
Agency Activity Report
If you are an agency owner or agency manager, you’ll have a new report called the “Agency Activity Report” at the bottom of the Reports screen. This report allows you to see the detail of what’s going on in your agency, such as contacts edited, leads received, emails sent, and all other events inside your agency account.
Agency Activity Report
Above the detail in the report you have several options to narrow the events you’re interested in. You can select all agents or a specific agent, whether or not to show agency events or user events, what type of events to show (events related to email, leads, billing, or the agency), and what severity to display (ranging from informational and notices to critical events). This will give a manager a large degree of detail to be able to see what is going on in their agency.
We hope these reports give you more information to help you effectively manage your agency. We’ve got more on the way!
AgencyIQ Customer Service Updates
AgencyIQ was created in 2003 with the premise of being a system developed for insurance agents, by insurance agents. All along we have striven to provide superior customer service and respond to customer needs as quickly and efficiently as possible. This philosophy has shown us to be a system dedicated to our clients and the process of working together to achieve growth.
As many of you have seen, we have greatly improved the system in the past year and a half, adding many valuable features and helping agents with the many needs of their agency. We have rolled out the ability to have customizable email marketing, customizable statuses, many new subscriber maintenance features, and even an update to our look.
Through working with agents, the staff at AgencyIQ have recognized the need for multiple channels for customer support. In an effort to make it even easier to connect with a customer service specialist, we are introducing five different outlets for connecting with our staff. One of the features that sets us apart from other systems is our unlimited training. We want to maintain this service, and we have added other options to make sure we are available to you. These can be found within our support tab, located in the top right corner of your screen:
- IM Chat: The IM Chat feature is available during normal business hours (Central Time Zone) to answer your questions and assist you with any needs you might have. If you would like assistance after hours, you can post a question and an email will be sent to the representative on call.
- Personal Training: Utilizing an online calendar feature you can now schedule a personalized training appointment with one of our lead management specialists. Schedule your appointment and we will call you to answer all of your questions. Appointments are booked an hour at a time and can be open to any topic you need to cover.
- Email: You can always connect with one of our representatives by email. Simply email your questions to support@net-lead.net and we will answer it in a timely manner.
- Webinars: We will be hosting regular webinars on Tuesdays for trainings on the system, and on Wednesdays covering educational topics. All webinars will be held at 2:00 Central. Visit our schedule inside the support tab to view the topics and sign up.
- Phone Support: Phone support is offered by our customer service team through return phone call. Our goal is to make sure that you get all of your questions answered, so feel free to call us at (877) 985-7400 and leave us a message. Your call will be returned promptly by a customer service representative.
Utilize one of these options or all of them. It is our unlimited customer service and easy interface that sets us apart. Contact us today so that we can partner with you to grow your agency!
Sneak Preview at our New Look!
We wanted to take a minute and give you a sneak preview of something we’ve been working on and are about to launch: our new 3.0 look!
AgencyIQ's New Look
A couple of things to point out:
- We’ve improved the color selection, producing a higher contrast look that’s easier to read.
- We’ve vastly simplified the upper-righthand corner, moving support options such as help, FAQs, and on-line chat help to a drop-down menu called “support” on the far right of the menu bar.
- We’ve moved the alert status (otherwise known as the “red box”) to the very top of the screen.
- The overall look and feel is much more unified and consistent throughout the application.
- We’ve simplified some of the language of the app, replacing the terminology “Line Of Business” with “Product”. This should make things easier to find and remember.
The main thing to note is nothing has changed as far as the regular operation of the application is concerned. Everything operates the same, and, with the exception of the support options, nothing really has moved.
We’ll be introducing this new look in the next few days, and we’re very excited for you to use it!
New! Password Recovery
We’ve introduced a new feature today to help you to recover your login information should you forget your password. When you log into the system, you’ll notice a message that says
We don’t currently have a recovery email address on file for you. This address allows you to reset your password should you forget it in the future. Please go to my settings to add and verify your recovery email address.
What the system is trying to tell you is “if you’d like to be able to reset your password in the future (if you forget it), I need a valid email address on file for you.” Supplying this email address to the system is a two step process. First you’ll enter the email address, and then the system will send you an email to that address to verify that you actually have control of that email account. Once you perform this simple procedure, you’ll be set for the future.
Simply go to your settings by clicking the “my settings” link in the upper right hand corner of any screen:
My Settings Link
In “my settings”, select the “Security” tab:
Security Tab
Enter your old password in the first blank, and enter the email address you’d like us to have on file in the second. Make sure this email address is an email account you have control of that is external to the AgencyIQ system (don’t use your user email address inside of the AgencyIQ system, if you forget your password, you won’t be able to log in to get the email!).
You can leave the last two blanks empty, since you aren’t changing your password at this time. Click the “Update User Info” button to save your information.
At this point the AgencyIQ system will send you a verification email to the email address you entered; it should arrive within a minute or so. Inside of this email will be a link that you can click on to verify that you were able to receive the notice from the system. Once you click on it, your browser will open and you’ll be prompted to verify yourself by entering your password again. Once you do, the system will mark the email address as verified and you’ll be set.
So what happens if I forget my password?
Well, assuming you’ve followed the steps above, resetting your password is easy. Notice the new link below the username and password fields on the login screen:
Login Screen
Just click on the “I totally forgot my password!” link, and you’ll be taken to a new screen that will you for your username. Once you enter your username, the AgencyIQ system will send you a short email to the email address you now have on file. In this email will be a link to reset your password. Click the link, type a new password (twice), and you’re in.
Now, if you haven’t set up a recovery email address yet… give us a call. 877-985-7400. We promise not to give you too hard of a time.
Online Training for New Agencies
AgencyIQ makes email marketing and lead management easier, and now AgencyIQ makes learning and setting up your new agency a snap! Make sure to watch these quick videos and complete your set up within the system. You’ll certainly learn new tips and tricks by watching these videos.
Set Up Menu
Online Training:
Online training for new agencies and new producers is a vital part of making the AgencyIQ system successful for your agency. To aid in the initial setup of your agency, we have added a set up menu to walk you through the initial customization process for new producers and new agencies. This section can be found in the top right hand corner of your screen directly below the “My Settings” link.
The “Quick Training I” video provides a basic walk through of the system, covering how to set up your AgencyIQ account. This includes the producer based settings (time zone, email signature, security login) and the agency based settings (address, email footer, lead statuses, and basic email marketing).
The “Quick Training II” video will walk you thru the CRM portion of AgencyIQ, and show you how to work your leads within the system.
Each section that requires set up is itemized on the set up menu, and the text is a direct link to the specific screen where you can complete each task. As each section is finished a check mark will be placed in the appropriate location. As you check off more tasks, the status lights on the menu will turn from orange to green, until you’ve completed all aspects of the setup process.
Watch for additional updates to our support and online training library over the next few weeks as we add more videos and options for you to make the most from AgencyIQ!
New Search
We’ve got some exciting news to announce! We’ve recently begun rolling out our new and improved search experience across agencies in the AgencyIQ system. If it hasn’t already hit your agency, it will in the next 3-5 days as we complete the roll-out. The switchover is automatic and requires no action on your part.
What does that mean for you? Well, primarily it means much faster searching! Simply type a contact name in the search box at the top of the screen and in under a second you should be presented with the results; orders of magnitude faster than the old search system. In addition, your results will be ranked by relevance, which will be noted on the left-side of your results… a longer blue bar indicates a “more relevant” result.
Hopefully this will get you to your customers and prospects much more quickly!
We are still tweaking the results and adding to this new feature, but if you happen to run into a snag and want to use the old search, it’s still available for a while longer at the bottom of the search results page. Just try your search with the new system, and if you can’t find what you’re looking for, try again at the bottom with the “old way.” Hopefully we won’t need that much longer, but it’s there just in case.
We plan on rolling this technology out to other areas of the system as well, including mail and searching for other things like notes and reminders. We’ll post more as these become available.
Please let us know if you notice any issues with the new search, and as always, thanks for using AgencyIQ!
