Introduction
Acquiring a new customer is the most difficult task in any business. It is considered to be 8 to 10 times more difficult for an insurance agent to onboard a new customer compared to other businesses.
Acquiring new customers is imperative for businesses to grow, but one shouldn’t neglect its existing customer base. Research shows that on average a customer has 1.2 to 1.5 insurance products with the same company. What does it mean? It shows that if a customer buys an insurance product from a company he/she is likely to buy another product from the same company. It could be the result of cross-selling. So, what is cross-selling?
Cross-selling is the practice of persuading customers to purchase other products based on their previous purchases. For instance, if one of your clients bought a medical policy for their children, you can use this information to sell to them an accident cover policy.
Studies show cross-selling can increase profits by 30% and sales by 20%. The chances of selling to an existing client range between 60-70%, while trying to sell to a new client range as low as 5-20%.
Is it easy to cross-sell products? Well, it depends. It is easy because they’ve already interacted with your products and can attest to the quality of your services. It is already given that they trust your business. It could be difficult as they already have one insurance product and might not be ready to spend their money on an insurance product again.
Benefits of Cross-selling
● Customer loyalty and growing existing clients.
● Increased revenues
● Generate more leads
● Enhance customer convenience
● Build barriers for other insurance companies in poaching your clients
Timing matters when it comes to cross-selling. We can’t randomly call up a client and give a sales pitch. Instead, we should make cross-selling a natural part of your agents during regular client visits. How to make it sound more natural and organic? The answer to it is conversational AI.
Conversational AI Powered Cross-Selling
Using Conversational AI is an innovative way to promote cross-selling to existing customers. It can provide tailored responses to all queries by customers, employees, and partners by using natural language. It employs natural language processing, understanding, and up to a specific level even natural language generation.
It enables increased communication, and deeper insights for the customer regarding specialized insurance products, and aids them with selecting the right insurance. It uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyze customer responses and provides instant resolution through conversation AI in an efficient manner.
Omnipresent Conversation AI
Conversational AI can be easily integrated with mostly all social media applications like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp making it omnipresent. Conversational AI’s omnipresence capability facilitates the agents to have more touch points with the customer in their preferred channel, providing ample opportunities for agents to prepare the ground for upselling and closing the sales.
Timing is Everything
Cross-selling insurance products is not an easy task. Convincing customers to buy newer insurance is tough and will depend on the level of service provided. However, a key point to note here is that many customers have the habit of missing out on insurance renewal dates. Many clients also need access to key insurance documents at all times. Certain insurance payments are tax-friendly in some countries, hence it’s imperative to have access to insurance payment receipts.
These can be automated using a CAI smart assistant even with subtle nudges in the form of small text chats or pop-ups. Once the renewal or receipt download happens, CAI smart assistants can initiate a conversation for cross-selling a related product or top-up the existing insurance to increase the premium, etc. Many times this has a higher chance of converting into a sale.
Proactive Conversational AI
Having hands-on knowledge about the entire customer experience and the mental state of your buyers and consumers on your insurance products can help plan better campaigns.
Conversational Ads with a blinking icon can be sent to customers through email or social media. When the customer clicks on the icon, chatbots can warmly welcome the customer and provide relevant product details for cross-selling.
There is no doubt that the future of CX excellence is personalization. Conversational AI by opening up the conversation with the customer must provide expert-like guidance, understand the intent behind the previous purchase and help them find exactly their relevant products in a minimum amount of time. This is a future state achieved with regular training on customer data, to let your system slowly become prescriptive by nature in a conversational setting.
The other important CX trend is customer journeys. Providing a great customer experience is the foundation for customer retention and loyalty. CAI will be able to interact with the customers irrespective of the channel, providing relevant product recommendations, guiding, and responding to their queries instantly along the customer journey. It improves cross-selling conversion ratio and supports the customer even after the customer journey is completed.
Automated Conversations, Enhanced CX, and Improved Cross-Selling Figures
Conversational AI reduces human intervention and can be there for your customer 24×7 to facilitate cross-selling. CAI is sophisticated enough to pick up customer signals on when to redirect an ongoing conversation to a new product or service. Its capabilities are increasingly becoming table stakes in every facet of insurance distribution. Insurance companies that successfully combine these qualities with a skilled sales force are frequently better positioned to forge close bonds with their clients and take advantage of opportunities for cross-selling goods and services.
Another important issue is the cart abandonment that we saw in my previous post. Though there are various reasons attributed to this customer behavior, one of the main reasons is insufficient information on the product or service. Customers need more time to be ready to call or message the company for additional information. CAI can pick up this scenario to initiate a conversation with the customer and provide adequate information to complete the online buying process. As a retrospective measure, CAI can send push notifications to customers on the status of the customer journey.
CAI can re-engage with customers on pending cart reminders, alerts on new products, discounts for existing customers or any festival bundled offers. CAI can add value at critical customer touchpoints leading to improved cross-selling ratio and repeat purchases from the customer.
Closing Thoughts
Cross-selling is always a product of enhanced customer experience. Providing automated customer support is definitely an advantage for organizations, but many miss out on an important part – Humanizing such conversations. However, following customer support teams using follow the sun staffing models has its own problems.
Here we need a solution that can effectively resolve customer queries, 24×7, 365 days and also actively identify, pursue, close cross-selling opportunities, and if required escalate to a human agent. Conversational AI is one such solution that fits the bill of all insurance organizations in this regard and helps both the company and third-party partners such as agents enjoy a win-win situation.
Would you like to witness CAI in action on how it can enhance cross-selling opportunities? Check out this webinar.
