How Insurance Agent are struggling with Sales & Payment due to COVID-19?
Insurance agents mostly visit offices or homes to customers in person in order to sell policies pre-COVID-19. More than 90% businesses are depedent for offline or push based sales. e-Sales, Digital Sales are increasing and it is causing the concern for most of agents on the ground. The life insurance industry had a total of 2.27 million agents at the end of FY20. These individuals were involved in distribution of life insurance policies to customers by the way of field sales involving visiting the person's home or office. Some of the challenges for these agents are due to below factors:
Most of agents are not highly educated
Agents are not provided proper technology tools training and equip with
Agents are not fluent in speaking over call or via video to connect to customer
Agents have not done digital marketing, and other tools
Due to COVID-19, preferences changes are there as like customers can not meet agent face to face. This has caused trouble for many agents on the ground who used to work as offline or via personal meetings. The result: falling short of sales targets and lower annual compensation. Agents are not paid any salary by insurers and earn only through commissions received from selling policies.
Every year, the life insurance industry loses about 0.5 million agents, mostly due to pink slips being handed out by insurers, apart from a small portion of inactive agents automatically removed from the system. Though at the overall level, there was a net addition in the agent numbers, it is no secret that life insurers regularly monitor agent performance and sales targets.
In FY20, there was a net addition of 83,719 life insurance agents. This was the net of 0.6 million agents added to the system and 0.5 million agents exiting the system. In normal circumstances, not meeting sales targets or frequent misselling complaints are the two main reasons for an agent to be sacked. However, in FY21 inability to sell online can also seal the career prospects of such individuals. New systems and online-only sales processes are being put into place. The top one-fourth productive agents (in terms of past sales) are being re-trained across life insurers, but the remaining three-fourth will purely need to rely on their offline selling skills. Amidst this, it is likely that several agents would either be unable to cope up to the new processes or be unsuccessful in translating leads to sales online. The future seems grim for life insurance agents in FY21. Those who are unable to make the digital transition would be shipped out quickly.
Artivatic has launched its digital tools to enable agents who have no skills to talk to customers, generate leads, explain products, video conferencing, and also how to have communication skills better. Artivatic will also teach them how to use computers, tablets or mobile to get them ready for Post-Covid sales, target meet for insurance to earn enough money to live better life.
Read about MiO - Digital Platform for Sales for Agent, branches, PoS & Brokers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjpDKLvxizk
For more info, write to contact@artivatic.ai
(Note: Article was originally published at Moneycontrol).