Why — and How — to Include Insurance in Your Client Review Process

According to the Life Insurance and Market Research Association (LIMRA)’s U.S. Life Ownership Study, 44% of households want a professional to review their insurance coverage and policies at least once every five years. If you aren’t introducing insurance into your ongoing client conversations, you’re missing out on a valuable opportunity — and potentially letting your client down.

Fortunately, creating a cadence of regular insurance reviews for your clients doesn't need to be time-consuming. With the right processes, along with your existing knowledge of their milestones and goals, you can ensure that every client has the coverage they need.

What to Ask

From life insurance to property and casualty, renters, health and long term care, the average person has a wide range of insurance needs. Fortunately, you’re already in a good position to match your clients with coverage that works for them.

Asking the right questions will give you important context to provide insurance advice. From there, your ongoing review meetings will reveal new milestones and life events that may require various insurance needs to be revisited.

Include these simple questions in your pre-meeting survey or questionnaire to identify relevant changes to coverage that might need to be reviewed:

Have you experienced any significant life events in the past year? (marriage, children, home purchase, etc.)
Do you anticipate any significant events in the year to come?
Have you purchased a vehicle in the past year? Do you plan to in the year ahead?
Has the use of your existing vehicles changed? (ie, a shorter commute due to WFH, using a vehicle for commercial purposes)
Has your household income changed?
Have you or your spouse's employment changed?
Has your health changed? (new conditions, medications, specialist needs)

In-House Research vs Working With an External Partner

After you’ve had the insurance conversation with your client, the next step is to compare their existing coverage with new products on the market. Market research may sound time-consuming, but it’s important to ensure clients are adequately protected and paying competitive premiums. Unfortunately, this is often where things get complicated.

As an independent financial advisor, it's easy to feel like you're drowning in insurance options to research and compare. Leveraging external companies that provide digital offerings will help you shop multiple carriers at once, so you can quickly compare and produce a curated list of options. Alternately, you may choose to work with a traditional brokerage that provides service directly, while you independently conduct research and handle the diligence steps through a high-touch experience with your clients.

Either way, documenting the steps you take in a workflow will help you bookmark your progress, create visibility and avoid feeling like you're losing control.

How to Prevent Insurance Reviews From Slipping Through the Cracks

Creating greater visibility and accountability around insurance projects begins before your client meeting. Start with the existing data in your CRM — look for milestones and review notes to flag anything that could impact insurance needs. Start the research process beforehand, so you can walk into your meeting prepared with options and recommendations that will demonstrate tremendous immediate value.

Documented workflows are beneficial during the research process, too. Getting these processes out of your head and into the hands of your client service team will make it easier to delegate this phase of the project, and enable you to focus more on client-facing work. We recommend creating unique workflows for different insurance types and providers, especially when researching or tracking for a client with complex coverage needs.

Automating Insurance Workflows

Most advisors who take the time to create insurance project workflows will store them in a spreadsheet or shared doc. While better than nothing, this can easily lead to confusion or lack of visibility, especially as your team grows.

Fortunately, Hubly can help! Working with a select group of insurance industry partners, our experts have put together a series of new workflows designed to streamline common insurance review work items. Watch the blog for an upcoming post about our collaboration with Policygenius Pro, or check out the video for a preview: