Automated lead qualification for insurance industry

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to talk about this topic i think what we need to do first is take a step back uh and look back in time back before the pandemic back before digital marketing back before computers and phones were prevalent in society and back when we used to actually go into physical stores physical offices physical bank branches uh to get things done at max maybe we used to call businesses to get stuff done maybe if you're ordering pizza maybe if you're actually a whole bunch of products and services you you still would call businesses but what united all of the ways that we bought things i bought and sold things was that with a few exceptions the buyer journey involved some form of human interaction uh we were walking into the store and we were talking to someone we were walking into the insurance agent's office and we were either talking to the person at the front desk or we were talking to the agent themselves regardless of what we were buying whether it was a pair of socks whether it was insurance whether it was mortgage whether we were hiring a lawyer it involved some form of human interaction now we all know what happened next iphone comes around smartphones become prevalent uh everyone has access to the internet in their pocket at home and business starts to shift online um and as a lot of businesses start to shift online the buyer journey becomes more self-serve uh and you see this across industries e-commerce is maybe the the most perfect example of this with companies like amazon where instead of walking into a store having a store attendant walk you around to buy things instead what you have is you land on amazon's website you look through all of their listings you decide what you want to buy and then you check out um and this approach of self-serve buying and selling online had benefits for both businesses and customers for businesses it gave us unfathomable reach because obviously the friction of getting someone to get off their couch walk into your store is quite high so convincing many people to do that convincing people to do that at scale was difficult instead you could set up a shopify store you could set up an on a landing page for your insurance agency and have it reach everyone in your area um just for a couple of thousand dollars if you're if you're if you run ads uh right so it gives us reach that we previously did not have uh and for customers similar similar benefit you don't have to walk get up you don't have to get off your couch you don't have to walk out of the door you don't have to walk into a physic drive over and walk into a physical store you can buy pretty much anything that you want from the comfort of your couch or the comfort of your bed or wherever you want to buy things you can get an insurance policy while you're driving out to dinner somewhere which is something i actually did the other day um you can buy a funny pair of socks while sitting on your couch you can pretty much buy anything anywhere that you want now insurance the insurance industry has been no different uh insurance agencies are increasingly reliant on digital marketing as a channel for customer acquisition uh if you look at some of the trends around this uh search volume for insurance near me has consistently increased uh over the past uh past couple of decades since google has been a thing in fact over the last two years alone it's increased by a hundred percent um and sixty nine percent of buyers start their search online the majority of people when they're looking for insurance they're not walking into the insurance agent's office they are googling it to find out more about what their options are um and it's very hard to imagine running an insurance agency today without um it's very hard to do to imagine running an insurance agency without some form of digital marketing strategy or pretty much everyone out there in the industry has some approach to being uh online some presence online uh be it through ads be it through social media uh be it through content um now for most people for most people in the world of digital marketing we'd say hey this is this is a happy ending right we've reached an era where everything's online you can buy everything online uh this is sort of the best of that this is the best outcome for everyone best outcome for business is best outcome for consumers right well not really because we do see issues with the self-serve model especially for insurance uh there's it's first of all for insurance in particular it's very difficult conveying value through a web page insurance customers are low information customers and what i mean by this is the average person who's buying insurance isn't an insurance expert themselves they need help making sense of what uh what they are buying i just bought auto insurance myself and i had no idea what it was that i was buying and i needed an insurance agent to walk me through exactly what it was that i was getting and differentiating between insurance agencies can be hard because all the landing pages tend to look the same and the end result is that page pages don't really convert very well uh another issue is that attention digital fatigue is setting in across industries attention spans are dropping uh competition is increasing and traditional landing pages generally yield poor conversion rates if you look across industries conversion rates are consistently below 10 um in some industries it's even below five percent i think for insurance it's a little above five percent but that essentially means that the thousands of dollars that you spend per day per month to bring people to your um to your landing page 95 of that 90 of it is going to waste um so when we're thinking about the diagram that we that we drew earlier where we're getting more people from visitors to leads and then leads to clients we see some of the cracks that emerge in the um in the in in this first stage of the journey we see forms and walls of text which are a landing page essentially causing people to fall through the cracks and not convert from being visitors in to leads um and the end result of this has been that insurance agencies have have seen a continued reliance on the older customer service model of converting people uh we can see this in the form of we can see this in the form of um of click to call we can see this in the form of click to call ctas um on insurance websites or recently i was buying auto insurance like i just mentioned and the minute i hit submit on my on my phone number on the insurer on the on the website i got a call from an agent and the entire interaction continued online uh and we see this across buyers across the industry right 74 percent of buyers start their search online but only 25 of them end it online as well um and the great thing about using this customer service driven approach towards insurance buying and selling is that they is that it addresses the issues that we were talking about earlier right forms and walls of text they just they disappear uh when you are talking to someone on the phone so this should be a happy ending right we've addressed all of the problems that we talked about earlier well it's close but not exactly um the issue with human driven customer service is that it's unscalable as businesses begin to re-adopt customer service into their marketing strategy they find that adopting a customer service driven approach is expensive uh you have to manage hr uh if you are hiring a larger team if you're a larger insurance company if you're a smaller insurance company it's just yourself and it takes all of your time and effort uh inevitably you're gonna reach a point if you are successful in your marketing campaigns uh you're gonna reach a point where it is impossible to keep up with the number of calls you are receiving at a single uh point in time and delivering 24x7 customer support is nearly impossible so in my example when i got the call from the insurance agent i was in a car driving somewhere i didn't have my wallet on me uh and the insurance agent uh we reached the point where i had i had to pay my down payment and the insurance agent said oh you don't have your wallet on you um well i guess text me when you get back home and i ended it was a friday night i texted him at 11 pm and we finished the transaction at midnight which kudos to him that he was up till then but that's really going the extra mile i mean he's up till midnight on friday night waiting for me uh to give him a text so that we can complete this transaction for most agencies this is not something that they they can do and it's not something they want to do i don't think anyone wants to stay until midnight and friday night just to convert a customer uh so what we've what we've ended up with is we've ended up with a situation where we've addressed the issue of forms and walls of text but we have another issue of cost and lack of 24x7 support so what the the dilemma of insurance legion is choosing between these imperfect options a human-based system that is a human-based system that is effective but expensive and disruptible and a self-serve system that's unengaging but cheap so what is the solution to this the solution as you might have guessed is chatbots you