Insurance Training: Best Practices for Virtual Onboarding

Insurance training programs can quickly overwhelm agents, requiring new hires to absorb complex product details, customer workflows, and compliance details all at once. If you aren't careful, this can cause high turnover rates, creating a neverending cycle of hiring and training.

With the right approach, you can create an onboarding workflow that sets up agents for success. In this guide, we'll share best practices for onboarding agents, including what to include in insurance training webinars and common mistakes to avoid.

Key takeaways:

• Develop a training webinar series that covers everything new agents need to know, from policy information to sales processes to customer service.
• Create standardized training and onboarding workflows with a mix of live, on-demand, and one-on-one sessions to accommodate different learning styles.
• Improve agent retention and performance by offering professional development opportunities and mentorship programs.

What to cover in insurance training webinars

From health to property insurance and automobile to liability insurance, these webinar series help new agents learn and complete employee onboarding quickly. Use this list of topics to guide your virtual training program.

Insurance products

Before new agents can represent your insurance business, they need an in-depth understanding of the products they're selling. Create product webinars that cover:

• Policy types, features, and benefits that customers value
• Exclusions and limitations that agents need to communicate
• Frequently asked questions and common objections they must answer
• Top points of differentiation from the competition

Record a series of educational sessions, and then make them available for agents to watch asynchronously. With Livestorm, you can easily set them up as on-demand webinars. Make a point of updating these webinars each time your products change — in most cases, annually.

Sales process

Whether you tend to hire new or experienced agents, you have to provide training for insurance sales. Create a series of short webinars that lead agents through your sales framework, from prospecting to closing.

Include as many real-world examples as possible from your agency's sales process. For example, include sales call recordings to model successful (and unsuccessful) customer interactions.

Livestorm makes it easy to add educational components to these webinars. Include polls at key points to ask agents what they would do to address an issue or which step they would take next. Then, use the responses to fine-tune your training and improve understanding.

Customer onboarding

Once agents close a deal, they need to know how to start the customer relationship on a positive note. Show agents how to onboard customers so they understand how to set up new accounts, navigate dashboards, and find policy or claim information.

Offer quick refresher courses that agents can access at any time. This way, they'll be able to answer most questions independently and continue to deliver excellent service. For specific questions, give them access to online meeting apps like Livestorm so they can connect with colleagues instantly.

Customer service

On average, insurance agencies have an 84% client retention rate. But increasing that rate by just a few percentage points can lead to a significant increase in profit — so investing in customer service can pay off.

To train new customer service agents, create a webinar that shows them how to access customer accounts, process premium payments, and answer questions about coverage and claims.

Then, separate agents into breakout rooms. Give them an example scenario to manage and have them talk through how to manage the situation. Record the sessions to create additional coaching opportunities.

Industry trends

Help insurance professionals understand how the industry is changing with timely trend-focused webinars. Invite multiple subject matter experts to a Q&A session, a virtual seminar or even a panel discussion, where they can share different perspectives.

Discuss insurance and finance industry topics like:

• Risk patterns that affect insurance coverage options and policy structures
• Technology changes that affect account and information access
• Changing customer preferences, needs, and expectations

Encourage viewers to engage with speakers. With Livestorm, you can allow attendees to ask questions for speakers to answer in real time.

Regulatory compliance

Insurance agents must monitor compliance closely, as insurance industry regulations (e.g., DORA, the Digital Operational Resilience Act) are constantly changing. Yet regulatory compliance can be a dry topic, even for the most dedicated agents.

To make this topic more engaging, develop interactive webinars. Pre-record informational sessions that summarize the updates agents need to know. Then, divide them into smaller groups for further discussion.

Livestorm's breakout rooms and media sharing feature make both elements of this webinar simple. Kick off the webinar with a live introduction. After playing the recorded video, divide attendees into breakout rooms.

Certification programs

Support your team's professional development goals by creating a program that helps them prepare for advanced certifications and licenses. Identify the most valuable certifications in your industry and develop relevant learning materials.

Prioritize async materials that allow agents to train as their schedule allows. Record sessions in advance and make them available as on-demand webinars.

Then, offer weekly or monthly sessions in real time. Have subject matter experts guide each live webinar, and invite agents to ask questions so they can better prepare for continuing education (CE) exams.

Tips to improve your insurance onboarding process

As your virtual training program scales, the administrative work can get overwhelming quickly. Keep these tips in mind to make the onboarding workflow easier for your team and more effective for your agents' learning process.

Confirm logistics before training begins

Training sessions and CE classes require valuable time for your team to create and for your agents to attend. Make the best possible use of everyone's time by clarifying logistics before training day.

• Share dates, times, and links a week, a day, and an hour ahead of live sessions.
• Plan a webinar dry run the day before you host any live events with guest speakers.
• Create and upload recorded sessions at least a day ahead of time to account for reshoots.

Standardize your training workflow

Setting up new agent training shouldn't require any guesswork or customization. Set up a standard training workflow for every new agent to complete.

Then, automate the process. Set standard timeframes for each step in the training process. And automatically notify agents when they need to complete or attend a new training session.

Keep track of completed sessions using your webinar software or learning management system. Check analytics to verify attendance, watch time, and engagement metrics.

Provide real-time and on-demand options

Increase new agent engagement by offering a variety of learning formats. A great training and onboarding program should include:

• Live sessions for panel discussions and expert interviews
• On-demand content and automated webinars for evergreen topics
• Video conferencing options for new agents to connect one-on-one or in small groups

Whenever possible, make your insurance training webinars easy for employees to access at any time. Keep content in a training library so agents can watch or rewatch as necessary.

For example, WPP uses Livestorm as an internal knowledge base. The agency uploads training webinars for employees to watch on demand and uses Livestorm analytics to monitor views and engagement.

Offer opportunities to upskill

Replacing employees can become expensive quickly, but retaining great agents isn't always easy. Globally, about half of employees are open to leaving their jobs for a better offer at any time.

One way to retain your best employees is to go beyond teaching them basic job skills. Instead, provide opportunities to upskill. Help agents prepare for advanced certifications, teach them to master AI tools, and work with them to develop short- and long-term career goals.

Connect new employees with mentors

A strong insurance onboarding program can help new agents feel confident in their roles. But without regular 1:1 meetings or team video conferencing, they can easily feel disconnected or unsupported.

Create a mentorship program that connects new agents with more experienced employees who can answer questions and provide guidance. When calculating the cost of setting up this kind of program, keep in mind that mentoring can double profits, making it a smart investment for many agencies.

Common challenges with insurance agent training programs

When training and onboarding new agents, watch for issues that compromise outcomes:

• Lengthy onboarding requirements: New agents have a lot to learn, and training can easily take weeks. Let agents guide their own training pace with on-demand learning modules.
• Steep learning curves for new agents: From insurance policies to sales processes to customer onboarding, agents need to become experts in many areas. Help them learn and engage with Q&A sessions, polls, and breakout rooms.
• Limited access to training materials: Allow agents to review training content at any time. Create training libraries so they can easily reference information and relearn skills as needed.

Livestorm for virtual insurance training and onboarding

Set up new hires for success with Livestorm. Make onboarding and training easier for life, property, and health insurance agents to access and complete.

Livestorm has everything insurance agencies need for live and on-demand webinars and secure video conferencing in a single platform. Host live events, create webinar libraries, and meet 1:1 from one dashboard.

Get to know Livestorm today. Book a demo to learn more about our enterprise and business plans.