Technologies that enable interaction in online advisory strengthen sales success. Because interaction gives clients the feeling of shaping their own outcome — provided the tools are easy to use and full of emotion.
Video calls and online financial advisory have become everyday practice in every broker's office and in even the smallest branch of an insurance company. Clients have long since adapted to this. In new-customer business, however, online advisory continues to face the same old challenges. Distance is hard to overcome on screen, and emotions — let alone trust — are even harder to establish.
The capabilities of Teams, Google Meet and similar tools are well known, and some advisors have become quite proficient with them: running comparison calculators on screen, presenting products, preparing a financial analysis and more. All of this is fine — but the limited scope of these tools carries the risk that advisors and clients don't feel they're meeting on equal terms. Clients find themselves in a purely passive role.
When clients feel, because of that passive role, that they are somehow inferior or being steered towards a decision, this undermines the very things that matter most for advisory success: building trust, emotional closeness and moments of genuine insight. Because these tools lack one crucial capability: interaction.
Clients Move from Silent Observers to Active Participants
Modern insurance sales demands that online advisory offer more than a one-way conversation — and that is the role of interaction. Through interactive tools, clients are no longer silent observers; they become active participants. This works by engaging all the senses: clicking, swiping, entering numbers and seeing surprising results. Making small, playful decisions — thinking and feeling at the same time. Getting to know each other. The advisor initially takes on only a mediator's role — a precondition for building trust.
To put it plainly: you need more than a video solution that only offers "hang up", "camera off" and "mute". When clients take an active role in the consultation through interactive tools, they feel far more involved on the path to a decision and are much more willing to sign a contract — because they feel they have control over each step of the process.
Key basics for this to work:
- The interactive online consultation should work from the sofa.
- It should be extremely simple to use.
- The software should include playful elements.
- The consultation process and its outcome should be legally secure.
- The online session should be fully comparable to an in-person meeting.
- The software should enable contract completion on screen.
Through pre-built consultation sequences, the software provides advisors with interactively usable slides. Nothing about the advisor's role changes. The wide range of interaction options means they can still lead their consultations — both on-site and digitally — in a highly individual way, from data capture right through to signing with a digital signature.
Right at the start of a consultation, advisors can make an impressive first move: if the software holds a DIN 77230 certification, they can mention that the financial analysis follows this standard. This quickly builds the kind of trust that is otherwise so hard to establish in online advisory — and sets the tone for every subsequent step.
Technical and Administrative Processes Kill the Mood in Every Consultation
The financial analysis is an excellent example of the psychological influence interaction can have on the advisory process. Advisor and client work through the prioritised topics of the standard together — and the client, without any outside influence, discovers what protection is missing, whether there is financial headroom, or which financial products may actually be redundant.
After this groundwork, the real advisory begins: a genuine, analysis-based recommendation of suitable products. Product recommendations require a certain degree of salesmanship. You need to tell the story behind one product's advantages, and draw out its differences from competing providers. Anyone who responds to this moment with too many technical details and feature lists is offering no more than a comparison tool — and becomes a mood killer.
Interactive Storytelling – the Art of Advisory
The task is to sustain interaction with playful elements while keeping emotions high through imagery. Stories from everyday life that anyone can relate to. Storytelling — the art of advisory, even for complex insurance products — is about making abstract products and services understandable, tangible and ultimately desirable.
What is genuinely new is the idea of developing individually guided interactive sales stories for various conversation and needs situations — anchored directly in the digital 1:1 client conversation. Stories should never be told from the product provider's perspective. They only work when they meet clients where they are. Clients should recognise themselves in the story — or become part of it — and guide themselves through the narrative using "if-then" logic.
Cross-Selling Through Interactive Storytelling
Some products are simply too unremarkable for advisors to imagine how to sell them despite an obvious coverage gap. Leaving such products aside for lack of motivation is a serious mistake. These are often precisely the products that open doors and create cross-selling opportunities.
This is well illustrated by funeral cost insurance: in the consultation, the tool might ask clients: "Does the statement 'I will not die' apply to you?" If the client clicks yes for fun and a humorous Dracula figure appears, a serious topic gains lightness. The programme continues in that vein, explaining the product quickly and engagingly — like a film in which the client plays a role.
Because clients are once again part of the decision-making process through this kind of storytelling, they are convinced by the product — and by the advisory itself. Once an advisory session has been experienced as positive and needs-based, the client is open to further protection and savings topics.
AI's Many Advantages in Sales Assistance
What happens next with all the information gathered? AI can manage the surrounding processes very intelligently — specifically in the preparation and follow-up of advisory appointments. AI takes on the role of sales assistant.
Within seconds, all information from an audio-recorded initial contact is transferred to the CRM or digital folder — not only in the brokerage office, but also directly at the product provider. Without anyone having to lift a finger. This means advisors can once again focus on their core business: financial advice. And storytelling.
© Zeitschrift für Versicherungswesen, July 2025, Issue 0713