Leveling up low performers and boosting onboarding programs made sellers better closers
This leading direct-to-consumer homeowners insurance technology company (“Company”) delivers fully digital homeowners insurance with an elegant user experience, accurate pricing, and fast, high-quality claims service.
As a fast-growing organization, they needed a way to improve onboarding programs and sales training to drive higher conversions on calls. Sales leaders knew that a data-driven approach to training their insurance agents was needed to bring in more business.
Compliance is a top priority for the Company, and recording customer calls is mandatory in the insurance industry. This organization recognized the opportunity to simultaneously meet compliance requirements and improve sales training and onboarding with Observe.AI.
Manual, inefficient seller feedback
When the company first began exploring sales training tools, the training process relied on insurance agents performing self-evaluations that were both subjective and time-consuming. At the end of a call, the agent would message their supervisor and provide a summary of what they thought went well or poorly. Supervisors would then provide feedback, but there wasn’t a way to gain contextual evidence with a history of past performance. While company leaders had tried introducing different solutions to solve this problem, they couldn’t find one that effectively integrated into their CRM. The company was also leveraging manual, stop-and-resume methods during quality auditing procedures as a way to protect sensitive information. In the remote world, this posed significant challenges.
“It became even more of a priority when everybody began to work from home. Our insurance agents now had access to things in their own house versus a work environment, and it became that much harder to have visibility into whether agents were staying compliant.” —Director of Sales, Insurance Company
The company needed to be able to redact sensitive information such as account details, credit card data, or social security numbers and also offer targeted, contextual coaching to its insurance agents. They thought they would have to find a way to work with separate tools: one to redact sensitive data and another to replace the existing sales platform. But then they discovered that Observe.AI met both needs.
Company leadership can now automatically identify top and bottom performers to prioritize coaching for insurance agents who need the most guidance.
The company has managers who are each responsible for about 15 people. Now, when insurance agents need additional coaching to meet their bind goal or insurance policies issued each month, Observe.AI becomes one of the primary tools used to help influence and improve performance.
Observe.AI’s team dashboard enables the company’s managers to monitor performance across all sales teams, filtering sales rep performance based on evaluation forms that are customized for a specific type of call or scripting procedure. For example, insurance agents are scored on quoting to ensure the right rates and options are offered. Each coach can also uncover performance trends and find opportunities to adapt scripting or processes that are causing inefficiencies with the team dashboard.
Managers are in charge of coaching every sales rep on their team once a quarter, but they also provide weekly coaching sessions for insurance agents who need additional support. The company uses Observe.AI Post-interaction AI to provide personalized coaching at scale, leveraging the platform to deliver specific feedback to each rep. Coaching sessions are also tied to action plans that foster accountability and commitment. Within three months of using Observe.AI, the average score increased by 5%.
The company has experienced rapid year-over-year growth and scaled its sales team quickly in order to meet demand. With stronger onboarding programs, effective marketing campaigns, and targeted sales coaching facilitated through Observe.AI, the company has increased its conversion rates. This is seen in the number of binds each sales rep closes each month. Within eight months, the company saw a 10% increase in the number of binds closed per agent per month, demonstrating strong sales performance.
Automatically protecting sensitive customer information
With Observe.AI’s selective redaction feature, the company has a holistic view of the customer conversation while also being able to easily redact account, credit card, and social security details from calls and transcripts. The feature leverages AI to selectively redact PCI and PII data while maintaining the context of the conversation.
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Meeting compliance requirements while maintaining the integrity of the call is critical because the company relies on call transcripts and visibility into what’s being said in customer interactions to train insurance agents to become better closers. Observe.AI’s selective redaction allows the company to confidently remove sensitive payment information shared by clients while still getting the full context of customer interactions for training purposes.
Fostering a people-centric onboarding program
In today’s competitive hiring landscape, ensuring new hires are set up for success improves retention. It also boosts overall performance metrics for sales teams. The company has a six-week onboarding program for every new rep that joins the company, and Observe.AI is used to offer an additional layer of support.
“We have a six-week onboarding program and a big part of that is listening to those new hires on the call and immediately being able to support them and help them do better.” —Director of Sales, Insurance Company
Information verification is a common area in which new insurance agents make mistakes. The company leverages the scorecard feature to verify that newer insurance agents are also adhering to specific opening statements such as the recorded line disclaimer, type of residence confirmation, and canceling or non-renewing confirmation. It also enables sales leaders to have insight into customer negative sentiment, and how often it appears on all calls per agent.
In the past year, the company has expanded the number of agents on Observe.AI by 25%, doubling down on the platform as a way to foster a culture of continuous improvement.
As the company explores new ways to scale its quality and sales training program with new headcount and greater accountability, the Observe.AI platform serves as a driving force in promoting growth without sacrificing quality.
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