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Location
Surrey, BC
Industry
Insurance
Number of locations
200+
Westland Insurance, one of Canada’s largest and fastest-growing independent property and casualty insurance brokers at over 200 locations and over 2,200 employees, continues to expand coast to coast.
The company is not daunted by the location management challenges that come along with this type of rapid growth.
By partnering with ReviewTrackers, Westland Insurance is able to consolidate local listing management, social + reviews monitoring, online reviews and reputation management, and marketing operations into one software solution.
The company uses ReviewTrackers to digitally transform and optimize the visibility of the Westland Insurance brand.
Cari Watson, senior vice president for marketing and customer experience for Westland Insurance, says: “At over 200 locations coast to coast, a lot can happen that would lead to potential changes to a branch’s hours of operation. Add to that a global pandemic that had many different tightening and easing of restrictions. Managing 200 Google My Business pages was simply not realistic.”
Enter ReviewTrackers’ Local Listing Management solution. This enables Westland Insurance to publish and distribute correct information about its branches across the web in bulk, quickly and easily improving brand awareness, boosting search engine visibility, and driving traffic and sales.
Watson says, “With ReviewTrackers, our branch managers can update their location information in a couple of clicks and have it synced with Google usually within 20 minutes.”
The software solution’s ease of use and the unlimited users feature ReviewTrackers offers to all customers — designed to drive limitless organizational collaboration — meant that Watson’s team did not have to shoulder local listings alone, or be the only ones able to act on the data.
“Initially, we had access and control with one team,” she says. “But as we’ve evolved the program, we have provided the tools and training so that branch managers can easily make changes as needed. This has freed up our resources to focus on other projects.”
Cari Watson
Senior Vice President for Marketing and Customer Experience
Apart from managing online listings, Watson and her team rely on ReviewTrackers’ powerful online review management suite to protect and strengthen the Westland Insurance brand.
“Many of our branch managers were business owners themselves prior to joining the company,” Watson shares. “They inherently understand the importance of managing their online reputation.”
ReviewTrackers has so far captured over 17.8K reviews of over 180 Westland Insurance locations from top online directories and business review sites, all in one easy-to-access dashboard.
Take the guesswork out of your strategy. Instantly generate your brand's online Reputation Scorecard, complete with review highlights, ratings, keyword trends and more.
The company has also set up more than 670 review alerts so that the organization’s decision-makers and branch managers — Westland has so far onboarded over 236 users to ReviewTrackers — are quickly notified of the reviews that matter the most to them.
“The alerts are configured to monitor trends or issues based on different areas of accountability,” adds Watson. “Some are set for the branch level, some have multiple branches, some provide a provincial view, and some users have the complete organization view.”
In the last 6 months, Westland Insurance has surpassed industry benchmarks and improved its average rating across all branches to 4.82 stars out of 5. (The insurance industry average is 4.55 stars.) The company’s average response time is less than a day: 36% faster than 6 months ago and light years ahead of the 15-day industry average.
Overall, the company’s average review response rate is 95%, compared to the industry average of 42.67%: a demonstration of Westland’s organization-wide commitment to listening and responding to customer feedback.
(You may view the full industry benchmarks report here.)
This type of benchmark-surpassing performance has allowed the company to optimize its brand reputation and win more business. How do they do it?
Apart from being equipped with best-in-class online reputation management software, the teams at Westland Insurance are trained to work across departments, streamline and close the feedback loop, and turn insights into action.
“We want our advisors to own the relationship with their clients so they are the ones encouraged to ask for reviews when they feel they’ve had a great client interaction,” says Watson. “We rely on the branch managers to champion this behavior for their staff, and they also lead the responses to any negative reviews with the support of marketing and their regional sales managers.
“When a client mentions an advisor’s name, the advisor is tagged by marketing so they can respond to the review and thank the customer. Marketing also provides support with the overall strategic implementation and more complex requests that may require help from the ReviewTrackers support team.
“In addition, we provided a number of support tools including how-to videos and 1-pagers on the features within the ReviewTrackers platform. We also promoted our internal rewards program for 5-star reviews.”
Cari Watson
Senior Vice President for Marketing and Customer Experience
Over time, tech solutions and workflows solidify. If a company is adding a new solution to its tech stack, the best way to do so is to consider a system that plays nice with existing technologies.
By partnering with ReviewTrackers, Westland Insurance is ensuring alignment and functional efficiency as the business scales.
The company, for example, is using Hootsuite to power its social listening strategy. With ReviewTrackers’ Hootsuite integration, teams can monitor and manage social + reviews in one central place.
This has allowed Watson’s team to save time and simplify the consolidation of critical feedback from multiple sources, including online review sites and social media.
She says: “The main benefit is the aggregation and ease of management of both our social media and online reputation management. Our growth from a British Columbia-based insurance broker to one of the top 4 national brokers meant we needed scalable solutions to integrate our acquisitions seamlessly, and we have that with Hootsuite and ReviewTrackers.”
See which integrations work with the ReviewTrackers platform.
With ReviewTrackers as its technology partner, Westland Insurance has streamlined the management and growth of its brand reputation across all teams and branches.
“We know today’s insurance buyers often begin their research online and we want them to find us to be credible and trustworthy so that we can earn their business,” says Watson. “As a community brokerage, we aim to have accurate listings with high review scores and a high volume of reviews to drive traffic. It is important that our information is timely and accurate and that clients can trust the information published.”
By integrating ReviewTrackers into their stack, the entire Westland Insurance team has access to the tools and technology needed to meet these goals. The company has been able to automate workflows, increase productivity, and expand brand visibility across all branches.
See how ReviewTrackers consolidates the operations of other top brands.
More importantly, Westland Insurance is acting on insights that have been generated by unifying reviews and feedback data into the ReviewTrackers platform. These types of customer experience insights are no longer a nice-to-have for industry-leading businesses, but imperative to a brand’s success.
“It’s important to us to continually improve our service and offering,” Watson says. “Receiving real-time feedback helps us pinpoint and resolve client pain points in a timely manner. ReviewTrackers helps us make sure that we’re monitoring and actioning feedback as quickly as possible.”