Meeting the Modern Customer: Why Digital-First Insurance Is No Longer Optional

Customers now expect the same fast, frictionless digital experiences they can get from Amazon or their bank in their insurance customer experience. Is your agency keeping up – or losing out? 

Rapid digital change across industries has reshaped what customers expect, even from their insurance agencies. But most independent agencies are still struggling with fragmented tools and manual workflows, as well as limited online capabilities. What results is slower quoting, higher service costs, and, ultimately, customer attrition. Competing with larger, tech-enabled competitors, however, is possible, with the right tools and workflows to support you.

The Digital Challenge

Current data for the insurance industry shows an 8.4% organic growth rate, the lowest we’ve seen in the 11 quarters since 2021. Commercial P&C lines, which are the bread and butter of most agencies, currently sit at 8.5% organic growth, after 11.7% in Q4 of 2024.

Yet, many agencies are still struggling under some key challenges:

• Workflow inefficiencies that eat up time that could be generating profit
• Fragmented tool ecosystems that spend more time than they save with separate logins and siloed data
• Limited carrier access throttling growth

This leaves many agencies unprepared to meet their customers’ digital expectations, with even day-to-day tasks still mired in inefficiencies and wasting valuable time and budget.

This leads to a knock-on cascade of negative impacts:

• Slower quoting processes that frustrate prospects
• Lost customers who leave seeking more responsive, digital alternatives
• Shrinking margins plagued by operational inefficiencies
• Difficulty scaling operations without increasing overhead and expenditure

However, the 2024 Agency Universe Study highlights that 32% of agencies have added more digital self-service options, with 27% increasing their digital interactions, primarily as a response to this difficult insurance market.

For agencies that have not shifted to digital-first insurance strategies, there is a significant competitive disadvantage brewing. By exploring omnichannel insurance engagement, however, they can better meet customer expectations and say goodbye to outdated insurance CRM systems that create more friction than value.

Digital-First Insurance Solutions for Modern Insurance Companies

A key part of how to modernize an insurance agency is by using the digital tools available to you to reshape both the insurance customer experience and how you work in the back office. This lets you make the most of modern solutions, and keep overheads lean – without compromising service standards. This includes using insurance agency digital tools to address these core areas.

Building a Modern D2C Experience

The foundation of a successful agency’s digital transformation lies in branded, mobile-friendly quoting and binding capabilities. Using these insurance D2C platforms lets agencies reach beyond traditional business hours and geographic limitations. 

For example, implementing “AI receptionists” and conversational intake systems lets agencies offer 24/7 coverage to capture leads and kickstart the qualification process, even when staff aren’t at their desks. 

A digital-first insurance approach offers customers added convenience. But it also shows that your agency understands and values their time. Using an insurance D2C portal for faster quoting lets you compete on the same level as larger companies with greater resources. 

Consolidating Workflows

Using a single, integrated insurance CRM platform is another key step in agency digital transformation. A unified approach brings together quoting, servicing, and renewals across multiple carriers, all in one place. This helps beat the inefficiencies that creep in when using multiple, disconnected tools. 

Modern insurance CRM solutions automate and simplify data sharing, even between functions. This helps eliminate the manual (and often redundant) data re-entry that wastes time and risks errors. Instead, your team can access complete customer histories and quote multiple carriers simultaneously. Renewals are also managed through a single interface. Not only has the potential for mistakes been drastically lowered, but productivity increases follow.

Expanding Digital Touchpoints

For true omnichannel insurance engagement, you need multiple, flexible entry points for customers and prospects. This could include referral portals to make it easy for existing clients to recommend your services, using QR codes for access to offline marketing materials, and even deep links that can be shared across multiple digital channels.

True omnichannel insurance engagement must go beyond the initial contact. It should include automated chat responses, email prompts and reminders, and even voice follow-up systems. Introducing automated touchpoints and reminders ensures your entire digital ecosystem nurtures leads and maintains relationships – without constant manual intervention from your staff.

Improving Staff Workdays With Better Tools

Agency digital transformation succeeds when it supports your team and makes them more effective, not by adding more busywork to their days. This means platforms with intuitive interfaces that reduce onboarding time for new customers and automate the low-value, but essential, administrative tasks that take up time for little value generation. With better back office support, your agents can do what they do best – nurture relationships and close business. 

Digital-first insurance platforms should be easy for staff to work with, offering streamlined workflows they want to use, not clunky tools that add more data entry and training needs to the table.

How bolt Improves the Insurance Customer Experience

The bolt platform offers insurance agencies the tools they need for digital-first insurance, both in the back office and customer-facing. 

Enjoy a fully customizable insurance D2C journey across not only personal and commercial, but also E&S lines. The bolt platform uses a one-pass, multi-carrier quoting system that uses dynamic question sets and smart pre-fill technology to streamline the comparative rater experience for both agents and customers.

Meanwhile, native insurance CRM capabilities include automated renewals and centralized communication channels, making sure no opportunities fall through the cracks. bolt’s Integration Hub lets you connect existing Agency Management System (AMS) tools with your insurance CRM, telephony, and marketing tools for an all-in-one, digital-first, and, above all, simple experience.

Agencies using bolt have demonstrated a 41% increase in quote premiums within 18 months and 3x distribution reach expansion. All with only a 12-week average time-to-market for D2C launches. See how one personal lines broker achieved 100% digital transformation with bolt. Now, it’s time to explore digital-first insurance growth for yourself.

Improving the Insurance Customer Experience: Your Takeaways

Taking your first steps to agency digital transformation isn’t as hard as you may think.

Start by auditing your current digital capabilities against your customer expectations. What gaps may drive prospects to your competitors? Where could you offer more convenient insurance customer experience choices?

Next, consolidate your quoting and insurance CRM functions into a single platform, like bolt, to eliminate data silos and workflow inefficiencies. Look at implementing self-service quoting and binding options, so you can better capture customers who prefer to purchase insurance D2C, rather than through brokers or other services.

Then, look to automate your renewal processes. This helps to fortify existing revenue while freeing up staff time. Lastly, you can then expand your market access through comparative rater capabilities, allowing you to serve more customers and generate better upsell/cross-sell opportunities without further headcount.

The Future of Insurance is Digital

Digital-first insurance isn’t just a trend. It’s a shift in how modern insurance agencies work. It goes beyond adopting new technology to reimagining how you deliver value to a new generation of customers, with different expectations and approaches to true customer service.

The best insurance agency digital tools don’t just digitize existing processes. They should actively enable new ways of engaging and serving customers. When you improve the insurance customer experience through this wholesale agency digital transformation, you position your agency as their preferred choice – a modern partner who cares about their wants, not just something they have to do once a year.
bolt offers a fast and supportive path to closing the digital gap and winning more business, even as the landscape becomes more competitive. If you’re ready to see how bolt can help your agency deliver the modern, always-on experience customers expect, book a demo today. We’re always here to help.