It’s no secret that the insurance industry has a reputation of being boring. Whether accurate or not, there is certainly room for improvement in regards to motivating insurance sales agents and providing a livelier workplace with more engaging tasks. Enter gamification within the insurance industry.
You have probably heard of gamification before, as it is becoming increasingly popular across many industries and workplaces. Gamification is “the process of adding games or game-like elements to something (such as a task) so as to encourage participation.” It is effective in making sales more engaging and motivating – thus it is a brilliant feature to introduce to insurance sales teams.
The primary goal of gamification in insurance sales is to increase activity on clearly defined performance metrics (KPIs) by providing a clear path to mastery. With each key task completed, users receive updates, awards, and a chance to take the top spot in leaderboard rankings. This, of course, makes it a very powerful tool to motivate every insurance sales agent on your team – and not just top performers.
Motivate insurance agents through gamification
“90% of employees are more productive when they use gamification.”
According to many insurance companies, their agents’ daily tasks are often repetitive, dull and lacking in variety. As a result, insurance producers are perpetually unmotivated and disengaged at work, with many of them failing to hit their annual targets. As a result, it’s no surprise that the insurance industry experiences a high volume of employee turnover. Lack of motivation leads to poor performance, which transforms into frustration and eventually turnover.
In order to alleviate these problems, consider what you can do to make work more fun and challenging. Create a focus on clearly defined goals, utilize leaderboards to show who is on top, celebrate achievements and milestones on TV screens throughout the office and run team and individual competitions.
Using gamification to introduce a sense of excitement and friendly competition is a simple, yet effective way to improve morale–and in turn, overall performance.
Increase transparency through data visualization
“50% of insurance sales leaders highlight the need for new and innovative products to grow their business… 40% question their preparedness to meet the needs of the next generation.” - Ernst & Young survey, 2017.
Of the many tools that insurance leaders may choose to employ, there is almost always one common goal: to make the use of data as efficient, effective, and timely as possible. Data entry is often tedious and time-consuming, and this is only exacerbated when you are working with outdated resources. To compound the problem, many insurance organizations struggle to provide enough awareness and transparency on key targets to keep sales agents constantly moving towards their goals in a highly engaged manner.
Implementing new technologies that show insurance agents exactly where they measure up against their goals is essential – not only for practical purposes, but also for employee motivation. You can’t expect people to be engaged in their work tasks when they do not have a clear understanding of what needs to be accomplished to get to goal. Introducing gamification software that pulls data directly from your tech stack (or Excel files!) and visualizes that data into easy-to-read dashboards increases transparency across insurance organizations, letting agents see how they stack up in real-time.
In addition to increasing transparency through data visualization, gamification software for insurance agents is a clever way to help them build good habits around daily work tasks and incentivize actions that help insurance sales teams hit their targets consistently.
Incentivize millennials through gamification
By 2025, millennials will make up 75% of the global workforce, thus it is more important than ever to recruit and retain them in your business. According to some studies, “only 4% of millennials were interested in pursuing a career in insurance.” So what can agencies do? We think gamification is key.
Millennials are intrinsically motivated. They also desire instant feedback and recognition, as well as a sense of meaning and purpose in their work. Insurance gamification software addresses these needs by providing real-time data, awareness, and fun–as well as encouraging collaboration. It is an effective way to engage Gen Y’ers and ensure that your company is keeping up with industry trends.
Gamification is ultimately an effective motivational tool for millennial workers because it combines their professional needs and all of the things that they understand most–technology, data, recognition, competition and game elements. It gives them a fun, purpose-driven approach to mastering their skills, while simultaneously shining a light on metrics and activities that matter the most in your organization.
Leverage Insurance gamification with SalesScreen
At SalesScreen, we do insurance gamification differently. We know that while “fun at work” is important, the key goal is to drive increased performance on key business metrics, resulting in more activity, more deals won and… well… more celebrating as a result.
We want to help organizations all around the globe stay connected across time zones, overcome the motivation gap, empower your middle performers, and close more deals overall. In order to do this, we’ve created a powerful SaaS tool that combines data visualization with gamification, allowing you to see all of your most important data in a clear, intuitive manner and also giving you the ability to use leaderboards, real-time sales contests, 1-1 battles, event celebrations on TVs and much more to drive activity on those key metrics.
By placing more focus on your key targets in a fun and engaging way, while simultaneously making results visible in real-time you will find that company culture improves, performance improves and goal attainment skyrockets.
Conclusion
Gamification has proven to be a powerful tool in addressing some of the biggest challenges facing the insurance industry–from tedious and time-consuming data entry to unmotivated agents and employee turnover. By combining new technology and gaming elements, insurance gamification is an excellent way to re-engage employees. In particular, millennials, who will soon make up the majority of the global workforce.
Curious to see how insurance gamification software can transform your team? Check out how Tryg is leveraging the power of gamification with SalesScreen.
