How APIs Are Affecting the Insurance Industry

Application programming interfaces (APIs) are affecting the insurance industry every day. It’s important for agents to understand how they are used and what it means for their business. APIs have a wide range of use cases for the insurance industry, especially as more firms move toward becoming digital insurance agencies. APIs may seem a bit complex at first glance, but in reality, they can be easy to understand and use. If you want to get into the technological weeds to create custom use cases you can, but many people leverage APIs without even realizing it.

“Most of the applications you use every day rely on APIs in some capacity. There are APIs for nearly every category imaginable…For example, rather than investing time and resources to create their own payment processing system, many applications use a payment processing API instead,” explains RapidAPI, an API marketplace.

In essence, APIs connect information from one source to another. For example, when you use an app or website that has an interactive Google Map in it, odds are that’s displayed through an API. The impact of APIs in the insurance industry may look a little different than the use of maps, but there are similarities. 

At their core, APIs can simplify and streamline digital journeys. Instead of having to bounce around from site to site to collect different data and perform certain actions, APIs allow more to be done in one place. From pulling in social media posts onto an insurance agent’s website and automating contact form notifications to enabling real-time quoting on a landing page, APIs for insurers can help increase efficiency and user experience.

If you want to leverage APIs to streamline insurance policy sales, we can help. Click the link below to learn more. 

In this guide, we’ll explore how APIs are affecting the insurance industry, with use cases across the areas of marketing, customer management/experience, and closing insurance deals.

Using An API for Insurance Marketing

APIs don’t have to specifically be designed for the insurance industry to still help agents. Many types of marketing APIs can be utilized by insurance agents to improve how they reach prospects and generate more leads. Some of the areas where APIs can be used for insurance marketing include:

Social Media: 

Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook have their own APIs, which can be used to create tie-ins to these networks without having to actually be on their platforms. For example, you might want to display your recent social media posts on your website, which can help you gain more followers and fill out your website with more content. Using APIs allows that information to be displayed. Similarly, social media APIs can be used to manage your social media activity within a third-party platform like SproutSocial, so you can manage multiple channels at once.

Email Campaigns: 

Building out email campaigns can also be easier for insurance agents with the use of APIs. Tools like Vero use APIs to pull in data for your email campaigns in real-time, going so far as to include the current weather based on your recipients’ location if you’d like. While insurance agents may not need this level of detail, it’s good to know there are ways to include information specific to each customer — such as adjusting content based on the type of business your customer owns — without having to manually write every email.

SEO: 

APIs can also be used to simplify insurance agents’ search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. For example, you can track your search rankings across multiple sites through tools like GeoRanker. Using APIs, GeoRanker can pull in your real-time rankings across multiple locations, such as to see how you appear in both Google and Bing results for users searching in different cities. 

Using An API for Customer Management/Customer Experience

Another way APIs are affecting the insurance industry is by streamlining customer management and improving customer experience. While you likely want to add customers to grow your business, the more contacts you have, the more cumbersome it can be to manage. So, APIs can be used to help you get the right information in the right place, across areas like:

CRM Platforms: 

Using a customer relationship management (CRM) platform can help you organize your contacts and get a clear view of each of your customers. But instead of adding information to your CRM manually all the time, such as inputting a new customer’s contact information or update where they are in the renewal process, APIs can automatically bring that information into a CRM system. For example, CRM platform Insightly explains that its APIs can be used for tasks ranging from automatically capturing leads that come from your website to syncing with other tools like your accounting system.

Contact Forms:

If you have a contact form on your website or landing page, that information can automatically be added to your CRM through APIs. Moreover, APIs can be used to improve the experience of using contact forms. For example, email delivery platform SendGrid has an email address verification API that can spot mistakes in real-time on contact forms. So, if a prospect is filling out a contact form and makes a typo, an API tool like this may be able to help prospects correct that error right away, allowing you to then accurately contact them. Otherwise, they might be waiting for an email from you that never comes because you have the wrong address. 

Customer Communication: 

APIs can also help insurance agents more easily communicate with customers across channels. For example, you can use APIs through tools like Helpshift, a customer service platform, to enable chatbots or customer service chat windows on your website. That way, you don’t have to build out your own systems for your website or direct visitors to another company’s website.

Using An API to Sell Insurance Policies

In addition to streamlining marketing and how you interact with/manage your customers, APIs are affecting the insurance industry by simplifying the sales process. As more insurance agents look to grow their digital presence, it’s important to be able to sell policies online in a way that’s convenient for customers. Instead of making customers fill out a form about the type of policy they’re interested in, and then having an insurance agent take a few days to manually compare policy options and rates, then get back to the customer, APIs can be used to almost instantly provide quotes and close deals.

Specifically, APIs for insurance can be used to:

• Display multiple quotes from different carriers on one insurance agent’s website or landing page
• Process payment information without having to leave the checkout page
• Provide up-to-date information to customers, such as displaying policy expiration dates and renewal information

Using a tool like Wheelhouse can help insurance agents leverage APIs and streamline the sales process. The platform can be used on insurance agents’ websites, landing pages, and other marketing channels, with APIs leveraged to pull in relevant sales information. Whether a client wants to renew a policy or a prospect wants to receive a bindable quote, they can do so in one place, with the API working automatically in the background. 

Overall, APIs can go a long way toward helping insurance agents build efficient, customer-friendly, digital businesses. Best of all, APIs are highly flexible. If you want to use pre-built APIs from other companies, many of which are already implemented within a platform, you can do so. Or, if you or your IT team want to get more advanced and build custom applications using APIs, you can do so too.

If you want to leverage APIs to streamline insurance policy sales, we can help. Click the link below to learn more.