Tag: Agency Management System

Insurance CRM vs. Insurance Agency Management System: What’s the Difference?

Posted on by EZLynx

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.

Posted in Insurance Industry | Tagged ,

MLC Agency Creates Better Experience with EZLynx

Posted on by EZLynx

Independent agency leverages all-in-one management system to create more internal efficiency and greater customer value.

LEWISVILLE, TX– July 27, 2023 – EZLynx, an Applied company, today announced that MLC Agency has selected EZLynx to be the technology foundation of its personal and commercial lines business. Through EZLynx’s advanced automation, MLC Agency will be able to standardize its operational processes and data on a single platform that will improve productivity, simplify management, and seamlessly connect to their customers.

“As our agency and book of business continue to grow, it became increasingly important to invest in a management system that would provide greater automation for our team and customers,” said Morgan Newitt, owner, MLC Agency. “By utilizing EZLynx, we will be able to have all our data on one platform and create more efficient processes that will help our team grow to the next level and provide the service our customers deserve.”

EZLynx’s integrated agency management technologies provide comparative rating, agency management and automation, commercial submissions, retention tools, consumer quoting, email marketing, text messaging, online client self-servicing, and so much more. The system maximizes agencies’ potential by increasing their ability to retain current customers while acquiring new business. By providing a central location, EZLynx enables agents to generate and store quotes, policies and documents, as well as easily remarket with up-to-date information that is synced from agents’ daily policy downloads. Through advanced automation and the ability to seamlessly connect to insurers and insureds, agents using EZLynx improve productivity, simplify management, optimize serviceability and increase profitability.

“Growing agencies have to balance multiple priorities – finding new customers, servicing and retaining existing customers, and running their business. Doing this effectively requires investing in the infrastructure to grow,” said Michael Streit, general manager, EZLynx. “EZLynx will enable MLC Agency to manage their business on a single platform, making their team even more productive and empowering them to continue to deliver the top-tier customer service they are known for.”

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How EZLynx Agency Management System Can Boost Your Customer Service

Posted on by Sara Button

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Customer service is top priority in the independent insurance industry. Giving your clients and potential customers the attention they need and deserve is how you separate yourself from the competitors. A happy customer is more likely to refer your business to their friends, so why hinder organic business opportunities?

How are you streamlining all of your client information, policies, documents, quotes, and so on in one location? The more clients you bring on, the more data you have to store. Stop storing things in different places! With EZLynx Agency Management System you can cut your data entry time in half while accessing all of your client information, policies, and documents in one easy location.

Within EZLynx Agency Management System you can boost your customer service efforts by working within one space. Whereas you may have previously had to look at multiple calendars before, or rifle through multiple pages of policies each time a customer calls, now you have all of this information – and more – available at your fingertips.

What can you do within EZLynx Agency Management System?

  • Accounting – track payments, split commission tracking, commission downloads, and more.
  • Accessibility – we organize your documents in a user-friendly, searchable manner.
  • Easy Renewals – with our Policy Sync feature, you can get side-by-side comparisons of application and policy information.
  • Online Document Signing – you read it right, its 2016 and you can sign online. Quickly & safely sign documents and send to clients for signature.

More than what is listed above, we are constantly adding new features to our Agency Management System. We want to help your agency work smarter, not harder.

Not happy with your current Agency Management System? Don’t sweat, give EZLynx a call. All of the data that is currently in whatever Agency Management System you’re already using can be transferred to our system. We can help you streamline your entire agency, making your life multiple pages and hours of data entry less complicated.

 

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