Having the right tools and systems is key to effectively managing an insurance agency. Insurance is all about relationships with your customers, so it only makes sense to invest in insurance tech designed to help you better manage prospects and clients across the insurance lifecycle. Two common tools that come to mind are an insurance CRM (customer relationship management) system and an insurance agency management system (AMS). While both systems can help insurance agents manage their businesses, prospects, and customers easier, they ultimately serve different purposes.
What is a CRM?
An insurance CRM system is software used to manage, track and organize an insurance agency’s customer relationships. Its capabilities include lead tracking, customer interaction management, and sales and marketing task automation.
It centrally stores customer information, including contact and policy details, and agency interaction history. CRM software can help agents track sales, identify cross-sell opportunities, and measure marketing campaign effectiveness.
What is an agency management system?
An insurance AMS is a comprehensive agency management solution beyond simple customer relationship management. Management systems allow insurance agencies to manage the complete customer lifecycle. This includes delivering enhanced customer service and communication that meets customer expectations, automating and streamlining processes, retaining customers and winning new business, and using data to help improve operations.
The best systems have intuitive tools for agency management, automation, retention, commercial submissions, eSignature, email marketing, text messaging, client self-service, payments reporting/analytics, and more. Designed to integrate with carrier systems, agency management systems streamline daily tasks with automated workflows and allow agents to easily access customer quotes, policies, claims, and other documents all in one place.
What are the key differences between an insurance CRM and an agency management system?
Insurance CRM
Purpose: Manage insurance customer relationships.
Features: Typically includes lead management, customer profiling, marketing automation, and sales tracking.
Workflows: Designed for workflow efficiency and to automate sales and marketing processes.
Integration: Typically, do not integrate with carrier or third-party applications.
Insurance AMS
Purpose: Manage all aspects of an insurance agency’s business operations.
Features: Policy management (rating, quoting, sales, servicing, renewals, etc.), billing and payments processing, commission tracking, and reporting/analytics.
Workflows: Designed to automate policy management, claims processing, marketing and sales, quoting, accounting, payments, self-service, retention, cross-selling, reporting, renewals, and more.
Integration: Integrate with carrier systems and other third-party applications.
Is a CRM or management system better for running an independent insurance agency?
While a CRM and insurance AMS are great tools to help agents better manage their businesses, they have different purposes.
CRM systems are used to improve sales and enhance customer relationships.
Insurance agencies need CRM systems to:
- Streamline the sales pipeline
- Forecast sales
- Track and manage sales tasks
- Quickly visualize the close ratios, deal aging, producer success
- Provide insights needed to recapture, win and cross-sell opps before the X-Date
Agency management systems are used to run the entire business.
Insurance agencies need management systems to:
- Manage all lines of business in a single application
- Improve efficiency by automating processes
- Provide exceptional customer service
- Improve and streamline sales processes
- Communicate and market to customers effectively
- Increase customer retention
- Provide insights for data-driven decision making
Ready to make your management system your most productive employee?
Discover EZLynx.
EZLynx, the industry’s fastest-growing agency management system, has everything you need to drive the best business results. Built for the startup and growing agency, EZLynx is an easy-to-use, all-in-one AMS that accelerates growth, prioritizes retention, and streamlines your agency’s workflows. Unlike other management systems that provide disparate, incomplete, or overly complicated solutions, EZLynx has everything you need to manage clients through the complete insurance customer lifecycle.
If you would like to learn more, chat with us to schedule an appointment.