Eclipse Insurance
The independent insurance agency uses RingCentral and RingSense to keep its multiple locations connected, continually improve its sales and service levels, and expand its hiring pool.
RingCentral has been our communications lifeline since we were a very small business, and it definitely helped us grow. And now that we have RingSense – which is like an intelligent set of eyes and ears, always scanning for ways we can improve our sales and service – we’re seeing even more opportunities for growth and expansion.
Jessica Holder
Owner
Illinois “Insurance Agency of the Year”
There’s a good reason so many individuals, families, businesses, and farms throughout Illinois and Missouri choose Eclipse Insurance to provide coverage for the things they value most. As an independent agency, Eclipse Insurance works with a wide range of carriers and – unlike a direct insurance company that sells only its own products – its team can recommend the best policy at the best available price for each client’s unique circumstances.
The family-owned agency’s track record of scouring the entire market for the right products for its clients, combined with its commitment to outstanding service, helps explain how Eclipse Insurance has earned a perfect 5-star rating across many dozens of Google Reviews. Those client-first principles also help explain why the Independent Insurance Agents of Illinois named Eclipse Insurance 2019’s “Agency of the Year.”
INDUSTRY
Insurance
HQ
Du Quoin, IL
YEAR FOUNDED
2018
EMPLOYEES
15
Helping a small agency deliver outstanding client service
Jessica Holder, who co-founded and today co-owns Eclipse Insurance with her husband Keenan Rice, explains that when the agency was in its earliest days, they signed up for a business phone solution that soon let them down.
“Our first VoIP system just couldn’t do a lot of the things we needed in a single platform,” Jessica says. “Also, it didn’t integrate with our other technologies, which we knew from the beginning would be essential to our staff’s efficiency and productivity as we scaled.”
Frustrated with these limitations, the team began asking professional colleagues to suggest a more capable and scalable communications solution.
We received a lot of recommendations for RingCentral from other agency owners, and I’m very grateful we asked. After everything it’s done to help our agency, I’d recommend RingCentral – including RingSense – to any small business that plans to grow.
Jessica Holder
Owner
RingCentral quickly enables efficiencies agency-wide
As Jessica explains, RingCentral proved an operational boon to the small-but-growing Eclipse Insurance almost immediately.
“Our team found all sorts of ways to use the RingCentral platform to improve our efficiencies,” she says. “We used the auto attendant and phone-tree menus to make it easier for clients to find the right agent or staff member. We used RingCentral messaging for quick chats between coworkers and even to share and store files. And we used the built-in SMS texting to let our staff communicate with clients or prospects by text when that was more appropriate or effective.”
As Eclipse Insurance began to grow, Jessica adds, RingCentral helped facilitate a smooth expansion.
When we added a second location, RingCentral made it so easy to keep our coworkers connected between offices and to keep the client’s phone experience seamless no matter who or which location they were trying to reach. From a telecom standpoint, RingCentral lets us function as seamlessly as if we were all in the same building.
Jessica Holder
Owner
Adding new insights and capabilities with RingSense AI
The next big productivity boost Eclipse Insurance received from its relationship with RingCentral, Jessica explains, was when her RingCentral account rep suggested the AI-powered conversation intelligence tool RingSense.
When our account rep Veronica initially explained RingSense to me, my first thought was, ‘That sounds like it’s for a really big business… not for us.’ But after I went through the demo, I was convinced. And now that we’ve been using it and experiencing the amazing results, there’s no way we’d ever want to run this agency without RingSense.
Jessica Holder
Owner
Eclipse Insurance uses the AI-driven insights from RingSense to gain visibility into what’s working and not working in the agency’s sales and client-service practices. And on both counts, she explains, the team can translate those learnings directly into operational improvements.
“With both our sales and service calls, the RingSense AI helps us identify specific words, phrases, or general trends it’s seeing that need our attention. That could be because a call’s contents suggest the need for further training – or because the AI recognizes that an agent’s phrasing or behaviors are hitting the mark so well that we might want to share it as a best practice to help train other members of our team.”
Jessica points out that RingSense is able to monitor and glean insights from so much data – tone, word choice, energy, sentiment – that it has been able to identify valuable opportunities to improve the agency’s client relations that she and her husband would never have caught listening to a random selection of agent conversations.
RingSense is like having a watchful eye on our business. It’s constantly finding ways to help us improve our operations, and it’s definitely going to help our agency continue to grow.
Jessica Holder
Owner