With so many great SaaS partners out there, it should be easy to move your brokerage to the next level. But before you get too carried away with the next great thing that comes along, have you readied your brokerage to provide a digital first experience? If not, those leads may well turn to junk.

Let’s think for a second how a new customer come into your terrestrial location. What are the elements that have made it easy to choose your brand over others in the past?\Likely some or all of the following helped them make a purchase decision -

• Brand awareness and recognition
• Reputation of your brand and your teams
• A convenient, highly visible location - easy to access, easy to walk or park, etc.
  

It would be considered a pretty big fail to lose the sale that literally just came directly to you. This customer has already gone through three of the five steps of the buying process.

In a digital journey, if your brand has done a great job at building awareness and trust factors, you’ll be showing up in the right places at the right time when a customer begins their buying journey. However, an online client is at best in the consideration stage. You’re not the only brokerage they have hit up on line.  Most often, they will be reviewing and quoting on several sites before deciding to purchase.

These aren’t worse leads — you’re just seeing them a different stage of the buying cycle. So yes, your online team and automation workflows are essential in helping them move forward in the cycle. It’s essential to provide your online team with the tools they need to be successful in this space. Here are some of the key factors to think about when building a digital first experience.

Speed to service - Absolutely an online lead is a junk lead —if you don’t have the structure in place to contact them in a timely manner.  This should be obvious but speed to service is the biggest barrier to successful online experiences.

An omnichannel approach - Be ready to respond to potential clients in the way that makes sense for them. Are they reaching out by text, email or fillable quote form? Did you ask how they would like to be contacted? What time might work best for them if they prefer a call? Once you know what you want the customer journey to look like, align with the right tech partners that can elevate the experience.

A human experience - Do you have processes in place to ensure every interaction is meaningful? Or are you just flipping a canned email response out to the customer if more information was needed? Believe it or not, we have even seen blank applications sent out as a next step, asking many of the same questions the client has already offered up in the quoting tool. With the right combination of carefully crafted automations and the right people in the right positions in your brokerage, you will have a winning solution for provisioning an online customer.

Before you build new online experiences for your current and future clients, talk to us about an ideation session. Together, we can explore how to revolutionize your workflows and ready your team to provide a great human experience, regardless of how your customers come to you.

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