How to Use Incentive Programs to Improve Product Knowledge and Speed

Three of the best leading indicators are product knowledge, response time, and follow-up.

2. Increase Product Knowledge

By improving product knowledge, your agents will be better equipped to knowledgeably pitch prospective clients the benefits of your policies and will be able to spot additional opportunities to sell add-on policies that fit their needs. Chances are that someone in the market for life insurance might also be interested in other policies your organization provides, such as short-term disability or dental insurance. They just have to be educated on your offerings.

Not only do insurance agents require extensive knowledge of your company's policy offerings, they must have the ability to translate that knowledge into laymen's terms. But given that insurance policies are not exactly light summer reading material, rewarding incentive travel points to your agents based on their performance on educational modules, quizzes, and trivia, can make this process more engaging.

Additionally, you might consider taking it a step further and plugging these points into an interactive leaderboard to create a friendly in-house competition. This will further increase motivation as agents compete for bragging rights and monitoring these scores will give you valuable organizational feedback. If all of your agents perform poorly on certain questions, that is an area you need to address.

3. Improve Response Times

By setting a goal of improving agents' response times to their clients, your brand will appear more trustworthy, reliable, and professional. Fewer leads will have the opportunity to go cold. Potential customers will feel like your organization will be there for them when problems arise.

However, corporate agents have a lot on their plate. Furthermore, many insurance agents are paid on commission. The emails and voicemails piling up might not seem like a priority to them compared to that hot lead or the next close.

Integrating your incentive software platform with your CRM and assigning points to the agents who make the most new entries from incoming calls or emails is an effective way to inspire agents to be on the ball, especially if they don't want to miss out on that great incentive travel trip.

Or you can raise the stakes and harness the power of intermittent rewards, by going around to all your agents at random intervals and rewarding all the points to whichever agents has the fewest voicemails on their phone or emails in their inbox at that exact moment.

4. Encourage Client Follow-up

Encouraging your agents to follow up with clients leads to improved customer satisfaction and area coverage, and increases the chances that they will provide referrals or look to your organization for their future insurance needs.

And given that corporate agents often have financial incentive to chase new leads at the expense of following up with existing clients, this is another effective method your incentive travel program can utilize to compensate for behaviors that often result from a traditional commission structure.

Segmenting your current client base by territories, verticals, or by the last date of contact, you can assign different travel reward points based on priority, and allow your agents to claim follow-up opportunities on a first-come, first-served basis.

5. Offer a Memorable Experience

Finally, you will want to cap things off with a phenomenal incentive travel experience that your agents will remember for years to come. The ongoing success of an incentive travel program depends on following through on the reward, and making your agents feel like their extra effort was worth it. Providing great incentive travel trips also generates word-of-mouth marketing for your incentive program, ensuring even better participation in the future.

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Mark Herbert is president and chief executive officer of Incentive Solutions. He has managed about $60 million in incentive travel awards.