Customer Retention is a complex task. Each department plays a role, whether direct or indirect, in keeping the consumers satisfied and inclined to continue working with their organization. Aside from customer service, marketing has a role with arguably the most impact.
Sales needs content to continue to have meaningful interactions with clients. Likewise, customer service also utilizes content to provide further assistance to clients once they’ve hung up the phone or exited the chatroom. If the content is vague, outdated, irrelevant, or impossible to find, their customers are going to be left feeling unsatisfied and uncertain of whether they’ll continue working with that organization.
In addition to the baseline complexity of customer retention, Annual Election, or Enrollment, Period (AEP) adds in greater complexity with compliance risks and restrictions on how and when marketers and salespeople can interact with customers outside of the designated AEP window.
With that in mind, while the salespeople are hard at work delivering the content and executing the strategies prepared for Annual Election Period, marketing should be thinking about the critical next step: customer retention.
Immediate follow-up content should already be locked and loaded for salespeople to find and deliver. The content that will be shared with clients—new and old—over the ten months or so post-AEP, however, will require a great deal of research, thought, and effort. To ease this burden, we’ve put together a few ideas for marketing content that can be shared to keep customers engaged with their insurance provider without infringing upon the compliance regulations and restrictions.
There are many ways to deliver your follow-up and off-season communications to your customers. The important thing to remember is to use a variety of human and digital touches and interactions. Too much of one or the other becomes spam-like and bothersome.
Always think about context of the content you’re sharing. If it’s ‘urgent’ information or ‘breaking news’, you don’t want to send it via direct mail—the two contradict. If it’s a heartfelt thank you, sending a piece of direct mail with a hand-written note will be more personal than an email.
Keeping your communications with customers organized throughout the off-season is also very important. Your CRM will likely be the best way to keep track of each customer, their plans, questions, last interaction date, and any contact preferences. Having all this information easily accessible will help keep you on track for having consistent quality interactions with your consumers.
Staying active on your social media accounts will also be important for customer retention. Share interesting or updated information from carrier accounts as well as your own original posts and be sure to interact with your customers as much as restrictions will allow.
When and how you communicate with your new and returning AEP customers is just as important as what you communicate to them. Consumers may not be familiar with the process of Annual Election Period which is why they need representatives they can rely on. They need a mix of human and digital interactions. And they need information that is pertinent to their situation.
The key to achieving consistency, relevancy, and variety within a highly regulated industry such as health insurance and Medicare is preparation. If you’re thinking one step ahead, you have time to be creative—take the suggested content ideas above and put your special spin on them. You have the time to review and review again—ensure that you’ve covered all your bases and kept the content within compliance. You have the time to ensure that you’re serving up relevant, captivating content for your sales reps that will empower them to create the personal and persistent interactions in various digital and human touches that will keep consumers positively engaged with, and endeared to, your organization.
To learn how Triptych helps our clients achieve these keys to retention at scale visit Triptych.com/features