Insurance Customer Service, Is It A Dead End Job?
For many CSRs in America, being a customer service representative is the highest you can achieve with your career. So this begs the question how do you keep these great people challenged and motivated without the carrot of a promotion and healthy competition with their peers present? In insurance many CSRs are content, and this breeds a distaste for change and the ability to adopt and adapt. We need to think of creative ways to keep top talent happy and productive while rewarding positive behavior.
I should say I am very against raises. I believe in a fair base salary with the remainder of compensation being completely performance based. Everyone in an agency can drive revenue. In fact, if you are reading this and are struggling, email me. I’ll find a way for everyone to drive revenue in an agency. You should get paid more for doing a great job at your job. Performance based pay means you are working at working hard. Also, it helps each person understand exactly how to make more money without a raise. Extra effort gets immediately noticed, this decreases tensions in the office about raises and fair pay. Instead you give them options on what they want to make.
I do think there should be tiers of service team members. When I say this I want to be clear. As team members achieve certain metrics we provide them opportunities for advancement. One thing that has always shocked me is employees willingness to do special projects for the agency, you can harness this if you do it right!
A long time ago I created a service team career path. Recently a client wanted to see it, I felt it was worthy of sharing. What do you think about this sample CSR career path. I started with Customer Service Associate because I loathe the word CSR.
| Title | Metrics to Obtain Next Tier | Pay |
| Customer Service Associate | Base Salary | |
| Account Manager | 2 Cross Sells Per Week or Cross Sell Tee Ups Per Week Retention of over 90% 1 Referral Generated Per Week By Asking This must be the average for 6 months Under 2 outstanding activities in the management system each week Management system use audit passing Good attendance and attitude |
Base Salary + Performance Based Pay based on activities |
| Account Executive | 4 Cross Sells Per Week or Cross Sell Tee Ups Per Week Retention of over 90% 2 Referral Generated Per Week By Asking This must be the average for 1 months Under 2 outstanding activities in the management system each week Management system use audit passing Good attendance and attitude |
