Agency Management System vs. CRM: Differences Explained
Sales is about so much more than just closing a deal, and there are many technological solutions out there to help you not just make that sale but to foster relationships that will yield long-term benefits for both you and your clients. Currently, two of the most popular options out there are agency management systems and customer relationship management (CRM) software.
The difference between agency management systems and CRM lies in the functionality. Agency management systems are a type of CRM but gives you a deeper dive into more than just sales. It helps you organize your total business. Which is better depends on what you want to do with this tool.
If you are just starting out or have been in the insurance industry for years, you will want to know what type of software you should choose, and you need to understand what the differences are between agency management systems and CRM. Choosing the right software will make a huge impact on your bottom line. Read on to learn more about agency management systems, CRM, and how to choose the correct option for you.
What Is an Agency Management System?
An agency management system is a type of software that will help you to organize your total business. It is about more than just your sales and your customer relationship management, it also includes your:
Client and group information
Agents, policies, and carriers
Leads
Data analytics and information management
Commissions
What is listed above only scratches the surface of what agency management systems can accomplish. The best part is that agency management systems are specifically built for insurance agencies, not developed for more general business needs.
Agency management systems are a software as a service (SaaS) technology, and they are more targeted in what they can do to help you run your insurance operations more efficiently and effectively.
If you are looking to optimize your entire agency, you will want to invest in an agency management system. It will be a one-stop-shop that will completely revolutionize how you do business. Sales are a very important component of this software solution, but it is not the only thing it can do, and when you implement an agency management system, you will be surprised at how much more efficiently you can do business.
What is CRM Software?
CRM is how you interact with your customers throughout the entire lifecycle of your relationship, outlining any principles, guidelines, or best practices that you follow. These are more theories, and developers have used them for the basis of CRM software. These are great tools to help you set and apply those theories in real life as they guide you through the process.
A CRM software is ideal if all you care about is the customer and supporting your customer interactions to close that sale. They help you to organize your client data and can help how you interact with them. This is, at its core, all about maintaining that client relationship, so it will help you do all you need to do to keep those principles front and center of how you do business.
In addition to the above, CRM software can include the following features to help optimize your client interactions, creating the ideal personalized experience to help you close your sale.
Auto dialers and caller ID
Tracking current and prospective clients
Automation
Email communication
Texting capabilities
Personalized website experiences
CRM software solutions are tools to help you reach and understand your customers in better, more comprehensive ways. If you are looking to do anything else with your software, you will want to get an agency management software instead. The capabilities in a CRM software solution, while great, are limited to all things related to driving sales. They lack the robust features of their agency management software counterparts.
Key Features
You can think about agency management systems like a CRM software but more. They can capture customer data and track sales and commissions in support of a bottom line. Depending on the software, they can do everything that a CRM software can do and more. They can especially help optimize organizations and the way they do work.
Despite being similar, there are key features that will help you narrow down if agency management systems or CRM software solutions are best for you. The features between each solution may vary based on the software that you purchase; however, in general, these are the features that will help you distinguish between agency management systems and CRM software solutions.
Agency Management System Features
To deep dive into agency management systems, take a deeper look at three important features. Agency management systems are the full package, can improve productivity, and serve as the ideal customized software solution for the insurance world. This is by no means an extensive list, but it will paint you a picture of what you will get when you implement an agency management system in your business.
The Full Package
With an agency management system, you will get the full package. Whatever your insurance may need to help track, process, and maintain basic business operations will be included in the suite of tools in this software. Much like CRM solutions, you can track communications with leads, prospects, and clients, but you can also do more, which often makes it more attractive to prospective buyers.
Typically, agency management systems have the following features to help streamline how you do business:
Analysis and reporting, providing data analytics for both your business and the industry as a whole to help improve your competitive edge.
Task management, helping you stay organized with all actions you need to take, setting timelines, reminders, and more.
Marketing, reaching your clients in personal yet auto-generated ways via email marketing, and more.
Managing group membership, organizing your clients in ways that are meaningful to you while still helping you communicate in targeted but segmented ways.
Commissions, both managing and processing them so that your agents can get paid out as quickly as possible while giving you a top-line view of your business performance as a whole or by specific agents.
Tracking all sorts of things, including agents, policies, communications, and more, helping you organize all critical client and business information digitally with a uniform structure to aid in locating and processing data.
Agency management systems are a powerhouse of a software, and with all that is mentioned above, they help you to manage your entire agency using just one software. CRM software solutions do not include all of these features, and oftentimes, people will need to devise complex workarounds or purchase additional software solutions to accomplish the same tasks.
The benefit of using an agency management system is that all of your important information is in the same place. All you need to do is remember to use the software as a portal so that it automatically tracks information or to manually enter critical data in the system before you forget.
Improve Productivity
Great teams are always looking for ways to automate manual processes because it helps save time, money, and resources. When you introduce automation, it can free up employees to do important tasks that only they can do. While automation is available in some CRM software solutions, they do not offer the capabilities as agency management systems. This is a key benefit of using agency management systems over CRM ones.
Agency management systems have great workflow automation processes that can only help save time but they also give you regular reminders of important information that you need to efficiently do your job and capture additional revenue. While you do need to set these up and turn on notifications, you can set it once and forget it because the agency management system will do all the hard work for you.
Some of the automated communications and processes agency management systems can complete are:
Reminders about policy renewals and other alerts to follow up on at a later date, which you can specify.
Notifications about new leads and policy status updates to help you identify new prospects and retain existing clients.
Auto-generated emails like happy birthday, anniversary, and other types of check-in emails to help foster personalized relationships with your clients.
Management for licensure, E&O, and more.
Agency management systems provide a very organized, intuitive interface for you and your business to organize your data, no matter what type of information it is. If you do not have an organization system in place, there may be a learning curve to implement it, but the agency management system will help make the transition as seamless as possible.
Customized for the Insurance Industry
Unlike some popular CRM tools, agency management systems are built specifically for the insurance industry. That means it was created by people who understand exactly what you need and why you need it. They did this by consulting professionals in the field, creating requirements based on what they heard, and then implementing a software solution that fits the insurance industry’s needs.
You will not need to develop workarounds when you use agency management systems, saving you time and resources. These are not one-size-fits-all types of software either. They have a full suite of tools that are targeted for your personal needs as an insurance professional. You do not need to use all of the features, but it is nice to have everything that you may need in one location without needing to purchase more later on.
CRM Key Features
There are similarities between CRM software solutions and agency management systems - after all, they both use the same foundational principles. Building and maintaining client relationships is at the center of all it can do; the software solutions just end up going in different directions based on the business needs.
If you are only focused on sales and customer relationship management, then you may want to get CRM software so you can get exactly what you need and no more. This will be the baseline of what you need, and as your business grows, you may need to expand at a later date to get additional features.
Centralized Customer Relationship Management
When you use CRM software, you can develop a robust client database that will centralize all your interactions. If the actions are completed within the software, it will automatically log your communications. If you are working independently of the software, you will need to manually log these. This is really going to be a hub for all things client relations, and it will be as good as you can make it.
Some examples of interactions a CRM software can track are:
Customer notes, so you can remember what you talked about at previous calls or meetings.
Emails, so you can send regular, automated check-in emails. This will help foster relationships, making the customer feel how much you value their business.
Policy renewals, changes, and more, so you can see all the different policies that your customer has when they are due to re-up their policies, and if there are capabilities to expand and offer additional services.
Think about this as a digital file for your clients, but also one that helps you compare all your clients with the click of a button. It will help you remember all of the important things about your client relationship if you use it properly. This is a feature included in agency management software too.
Leads tracking
When you are looking to build a book of business, tracking potential leads is essential. When you are using CRM software solutions, you can help to track potential clients, prospecting their potential worth and insurance needs through detailed analytics and reporting. It will be specific to the client and not the industry as a whole, but it will provide valuable insight to their needs at the moment.
Even better, as you approach these clients, CRM software can help you model what policies they may want based on what you know about them. This could be for policies and any other services you provide.
Communication
In most CRM software solutions, you can call your customers through the platform. You do not need to leave it, which provides added convenience and safeguards against any potential misdials. Additionally, some CRM software solutions provide you with the ability to text through the platform as well. These could be from texts that you send at mass to your clients or one-off communications.
The communication abilities are on top of email, marketing, and other efforts to help support your relationship with your client throughout its full lifecycle. These touches help your clients to feel valued as an individual, especially if they do not know the secret behind the curtain.
Deciding Which is Right for You
There are a lot of similarities between agency management systems and CRMs, and you may still be wondering which type of software is right for you. Below is a summary of some of the features that you can expect when you choose between CRM and agency management system softwares, though keep in mind some features may vary based on the software you choose.
As you can see, in general, agency management systems can do everything that a CRM software solution can, but CRM cannot do everything that an agency management system can do.
Consider what you hope to accomplish with your software. Are you simply looking for a way to organize your client communications? Then a CRM system may be the ideal match for you. It is, at its most simple, a great way for insurance agents to organize everything related to making that final sale.
If you are looking to do that and more, you may want to invest in an agency management system. It can help you track your client relationships, but it can also provide more robust analytics, track more complex groupings, and process commissions. This will help you to manage your entire agency all in one tool.
Ultimately, agency management systems and CRM software solutions will be an investment, so you will need to make sure that you know what your budget is and what your needs are.
Conclusion
Both agency management systems and other CRMs will help you to be more efficient, impacting how you do business, and your clients will see a difference in how you interact with them in more frequent and personalized ways. Both are cloud-based, so you will be able to access your information, no matter where you are.
Keep in mind that even if you do not use all of the features on an agency management system, it is easier to flex up later than needing to either upgrade from a CRM or add additional software to accomplish what an agency management system could out of the box. There are pros and cons to using both systems, and ultimately, the choice is yours as to what will suit your business and your book best.
Sources:
https://www.agencybloc.com/resources/manage-your-agency/technology/agency-management-system-vs-crm/
https://nextagency.com/blog/crm-versus-agency-management-software/
