Because the majority of business owners are in their 50s, many insurance agents assume their business clients are old-school—more comfortable with paper than digital applications.

But this assumption completely underestimates who these people are. The kind of person who chooses business ownership over traditional employment is an innovator. They’re as much entrepreneurs as a Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg—and are often just as comfortable using technology.

Business owners are not just tech-savvy—they expect the people they do business with to be tech-savvy, too. If you disappoint them, they’ll seek out other agents who meet their expectations.

Most studies of entrepreneurs and business owners reveal that they are quick to adopt technology to enhance both their business and personal lives. For example, a 2016 small and medium business owner survey by Babson University found that 78% of respondents consider technology, including keeping up with new technology, to be “extremely” or “very” important to the growth of their businesses.

Meanwhile, Experian reports that small business owners are 30% more interested in being online than the general U.S. population, and Social Media Examiner’s seventh annual Social Media Marketing Industry Report showed that 96% of small and medium business owners use social media marketing.

Rather than accept the status quo, entrepreneurs and other business owners are constantly looking for ways to improve things. Someone who’s built a business from scratch has learned to use all available resources to overcome challenges and has likely become quite comfortable with digital solutions.

And given the entrepreneurial focus on getting things done fast, it’s not surprising that business owners embrace technology as a powerful time management tool.

Time Is Money

Technology can be a powerful way to eliminate data entry and other basic tasks—an extremely important benefit for chronically time-crunched business owners. Entrepreneurs are particularly conscious of the value of time and greatly appreciate anything that will help them speed up basic tasks or do away with such tasks altogether.

The growing trend of accounting automation is one example of how technology has helped many business owners save time on basic tasks. Business owners are embracing accounting automation for many reasons, including:

• Reduced need for data entry: Business owners who had previously toiled over Excel spreadsheets and spent hours on data entry are now able to use QuickBooks or a similar product to manage their books with a few clicks of a mouse. For example, QuickBooks can automatically import bank and credit card transactions directly from the bank’s website.
• Less chance for user error: The more a business automates tasks, the less opportunity there is for errors to creep in and skew the results.
• Scalability: Automation makes it relatively easy for businesses to add new products, vendors and customers.
• Accessibility: It’s easy for multiple people to use a modern software-based accounting system, particularly one in the cloud. That means business owners can assign different employers to manage accounting tasks or even outsource such tasks to a third party, while still keeping control of and access to their books.

Updating the Renewal Process

It’s particularly important to consider how your clients view your insurance renewal process, since that’s a time when it’s natural for them to consider shifting to a different insurance agency.

Let’s say a client has three to five policies which come up for renewal every year. Several require multiple quotes from different carriers, which means you’re looking at having your client fill out at least five to ten applications each year just to find the best coverage package. And that’s on the low end.

If you handle this process through Excel spreadsheets, PDF forms and email, your average client is probably spending several hours doing insurance paperwork, some of which involves providing the exact same information on multiple forms (and often filling out nearly identical forms year after year). Once they’ve filled out and returned all those forms, you then must review the forms and get back to the client with any questions or comments, which means that they’ll probably have to spend yet more time either fixing errors or clarifying her answers.

Compare that to a process that incorporates automation: A client logs on to a single online platform and fills out the forms you’ve selected. The form fields are mapped so that as your client enters their information, it’s duplicated across other forms which ask the same questions—ensuring your client only needs to answer any given question once.

The platform also checks for required answers, making it less likely that the client will leave out some crucial piece of information and have to come back to the same form again. And at renewal time, the client’s information from the previous year is retained in this online system, so they can simply check over each form and correct anything that’s changed since last time.

Such a process is well within the technological comfort zone of your average business owner, and its advantages over the traditional paper application process will be perfectly clear.

Moving to a digital application process will save your clients a huge amount of time, which is a tremendous customer attraction and retention tool. Additionally, once their data is on the online platform, your clients will know that going to another agency will mean starting from scratch, which can be a compelling motivator for them to stick with you.

The result: Business owners view your agency as a tech adopter like them, not a dinosaur agency like your competitors.

Mike Furlong is CEO of Indio Technologies, a software for insurance agencies wanting to turn their application and renewal process into a fully digital, modern customer experience.