The Call We Almost Didn't Make

We started making welcome calls on every new policy a few months ago. Not just new clients. Every new policy, including cross-sells and rewrites for people who've been with us for years. 

I'd wanted to do this for a long time, but there was always another priority in front of it, and I've learned the hard way that an agency can only really run a handful of priorities at once before everything stalls. So, this one sat in my idea pipeline. When the time finally opened up, I built the SOP, launched it to the team, and created a template in HawkSoft so every welcome call follows the same agenda. 

Every month we waited was a month of these calls not happening, and I don't know what we missed in that window. The lesson isn't "wait for the perfect time." It's that the time opens up when you close out something else.

The HawkSoft template does one more thing I care about. It lets me track our success rate. For us, success is simple: did we connect with the client. We make two attempts by phone and two by email. If we reach them, that's a win. If we've tried twice both ways and still can't get them, we mark it and move on. Right now we're hovering around a 68% connect rate since we started.

Here's what these calls keep surfacing. Clients whose plans for an existing property changed, which changes the coverage they actually need. Payments that never went through, caught before they turned into a cancellation. Coverage questions people were quietly sitting on, the kind they don't think to ask until something happens.  

We used to just send the welcome email and move on. Who knows if most of those emails got ignored. People are busy. They skim it, file it, probably forget it. A call is different. You're there, they're there, and things come out that nobody thinks to put in writing. 

On the call we cover how to do business with us. Some of that gets said at the point of sale, but the sale is a blur for most clients because of the volume of information. A reminder most times lands better a week later. We remind them what to do if they have a claim, call us first. It's also the natural moment to bring up life insurance, ask for a referral, google reviews and if they own a business, ask about their other coverage. 

Track it. That's the part people skip. Like any new initiative, you want to know what's working and what isn't. The 68% tells me one thing. What the team tells me about how the calls actually go tells me another. You need both, the metric and the anecdote. 

The welcome call is one of the cheapest ways I've found to stand apart. Unfortunately, most agencies are not doing it.