According to recent a recent study, 85% of consumers value customer experience as highly as a company's products and services, and 80% of businesses rely on customer experience to differentiate themselves from the competition.

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This makes putting the best face on customer service a crucial business objective.

 

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers were never fans of phone trees and rushing through calls with agents.

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With many consumers beginning to venture back into the economy, customer experience is now more important than ever.

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How can your agency rise to the challenge? One way is to make face-to-face meetings with clients – a hallmark of the way Farm Bureau Insurance has always done business – a priority. This is the idea behind the "Face-To-Face" initiative recently launched by the Sales department. 

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Nampa agent Cody Chavers recently shared his thoughts on the initiative with Coverage.

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Why do you think it’s important to meet with clients in person?

It's very important to meet with clients in person because it opens up the opportunity for fact-finding and relationship building. When you are able to sit directly across from someone, look at them, and explain why you're asking personal questions and what that has to do with insurance, they're more likely to open up and share the information you need. It shows you care about them. It shows you are willing to take time out of your day to help them, and it shows you are there for them. I'm a big fan of the "Your World" sales tool, and Face-To-Face really is the only way to utilize that tool effectively, in my experience. 

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Do you have any examples where a personal meeting led to an important client sales opportunity discovery that otherwise wouldn’t have happened?

I had a couple referred to me who were not from around here. It started out that they were "just shopping" for homeowners insurance on a home they were looking at buying. After a few minutes on the phone with them,
I was able to convince them to a face-to-face meeting, and we met at their rental. During our meeting, while going over their current coverages for auto, we discovered they didn't have any coverage for their contents. The husband obviously was not thrilled to find out they didn't have coverage in that area. They thought they had it bundled with their auto, but it turned out they didn't. So, I wrote them a contents policy and brought their autos over at the same time. A month later, they found their home, and we replaced the contents coverage for a residence. Today, we are working together on life policies for the whole family. What started as people just shopping for home insurance, turned into exposing an area where they had no coverage, turned into me writing both property and auto, to us working together on what life policies will fit them best. All because I kept asking them to sit down with me versus giving a quote over the phone.    

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What do you do if you can’t meet in person with a client?

Now that we are further into the year, it hasn't been as much of an issue. But, I did have a family when I first started where the wife worked in the medical field, and she didn't want to meet due to her duties at a local urgent care center. We wound up doing a face-to-face via Facetime. 
I ended up writing them because the wife was pleased that I was able to
be flexible and understood her concerns of being around others when the whole COVID event first started.   

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Is there anything else you’d like to say about meeting in person with clients / the Face-To-Face initiative?

I believe you, as an agent, will have a much more loyal client base by doing the face-to-face initiative. I was fortunate; my Farm Bureau agent met with me face-to-face at least once a year. Sometimes more if needed. And that's one of the main reasons why I stayed with Farm Bureau. It still shocks me how many people I talk to who don't get that from their current carrier. 

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