It’s April! Baseball has started, flowers are starting to blossom and it’s time to do a little spring cleaning. Not just at home but let’s take a look at the messes within our agencies and come up with some plans to do a little agency spring cleaning as well. Here are the top six messes that we at Agency Performance Partners see when we work with independent insurance agencies.
Mess #1 – Lack of Quality Job Descriptions & Employee Reviews
Let’s start off with the one that is probably the easiest to resolve. Many agencies that we work with do not have a job description for their employees. Typically we hear things like “Well, everyone knows what they are supposed to do”. But as we dig in deeper we find that there is often confusion over job responsibilities or lack of execution on items that should be done but are considered lower priority or are simply outside of the comfort zone of the employee. Compounding this issue is the lack of any type of formal review process where the employee can receive feedback on his or her performance and be given direction on where they should improve. There is a general fear that our staff “can’t handle the truth” or that since there is no way to hold them accountable without firing them, we are just going to have uncomfortable conversations with no real solution.
In fact, most employees crave a more structured approach. A good quality job description should not only define the tasks that are the responsibility of each team member but set goals and define key performance indicators to allow the employee to understand the definition of success in each area. The best way I’ve seen to create these is by making them SMART goals; this creates objectivity and clarity for both the manager and employee.
For employee reviews, there are numerous approaches. The traditional once a year review has been replaced with at least a quarterly if not monthly one-on-one meeting between the manager and the employee to go through each metric for month to date, quarter to date, and year to date expectations. Some agencies are even moving to a once a week one-on-one as a quick catch-up with more defined metric discussions at the end of the month and/or the halfway point.
Every agency owner needs to decide the best job description and review process for their agency, but to truly clean-up this area, this needs to be better defined.
Mess #2 – Bad Entry and No Data Clean-up or Maintenance Process
There are very few agents that I speak with that are confident that the data in their system is up-to-date, accurate or consistently entered. Too often we rely on download or the staff to correctly do the entry into the system but with carriers not consistent with each other on how they download and without a clear process to enter and audit our staff’s entry, we will inevitably be left with bad data in the system.
To clean this up and prevent it from happening in the future, we need to take three steps.
- Create agency standards for entry
- Develop a process to clean-up the database today
- Develop a process to maintain the database moving forward
The first step in this process is to identify the areas of concern. This list is not meant to be inclusive and I realize the terminology and entry can be different depending on the agency management system, but here are some of the common reports that can be run:
- Active clients with no active policies
- Inactive clients with active policies
- Unbilled policies
- Clients without DOBs
- Clients without emails or clearly invalid emails
- Clients where cell phone numbers are not clearly identified
- Rewrites marked as new business
- Active policies with a expiration date in the past
Once you have your list, sit down and write out the process that will prevent errors for each one. Then develop a process to fix the ones that are incorrect in the system now and a way to identify ones that are entered correctly (typically in the form of an exception report).
Mess #3 – Lack of a Marketing Plan and Budget
Although I am seeing a change in this area over the last couple of years, there is still a glaring hole in our lead generation process when it comes to marketing. Very few agencies have a marketing strategy, plan, or budget. For years we have relied on relationships and networking to drive referrals, but the way to drive business is rapidly changing.
We need to open up additional methods to drive business especially through online channels. I know there is a hesitancy to drive business online due to quality, however, as the younger generation starts to age the quality of the online business is going to improve. And at some point we will have waited too long to start to learn how to drive business this way. A good marketing strategy can continue to lean on referrals and word of mouth but do it online. A major component to this is managing your online testimonials. People are as willing to listen to a stranger’s review of your agency as they are a recommendation of a friend.
Referrals themselves are becoming harder to drive without a more formalized plan as well. It used to be fairly easy to drive referrals using relationships that had developed over the years. With more competition looking for referrals both from your professional networks (realtors, mortgage brokers, etc.) as well as from your clients, you need to design a more formalized approach to requesting referrals and thanking those that provide them.
Mess #4 – No Defined Customer Experience or Proactive Renewal Process
Similar to a lack of a marketing plan, there are very few agents that I speak with that have created a formal customer experience strategy. While I often see components of one (such as a follow-up call after a new business is sold or after a claim is settled), the full customer experience is rarely defined. This includes no set renewal process unless we need information from a client or the increase is X%. Sometimes there is a focus on monoline accounts as well, but this means that we can go years without talking with our better customers. How do they know to call us first when they have a question or something goes wrong if they never hear from us?
When creating a Customer Experience process, there are 5 areas on which to focus:
- Awareness – How are you making potential prospects aware of you?
- Sales Process – See Mess #5 below!
- Onboarding Program – How are you welcoming new clients to the agency?
- Client Marketing Strategy – How are you making sure that your clients know to call you first and to recommend you to their friends?
- Proactive Renewal Process – How are you creating a positive renewal process for your clients (as opposed to just getting the dec page in the mail by the carrier)?
Mess #5 – No Consistent Sales Process
Even in agencies with strong sales people, the process is rarely formalized. This means it is very hard to transfer that knowledge to new employees, the service staff, or those that are struggling in sales. Often when I ask the question, “who is responsible for sales”, I am told “Everybody!” by the agency principal, but they have set up the sales process and don’t really set the expectation for the service team to sell. There is often a stale goal that may or may not be reached and often a bonus for cross-selling an account, but without a process, most service people struggle to prioritize writing new business.
When creating a sales process, there are 5 steps to walk the prospect through:
- Building Rapport – You are more than a transaction to us
- Insurance Interrogation – Are we gathering data in a conversational way so that the prospect does not feel interrogated?
- Setting Expectations – Are we quoting on the phone or are we calling back? If we are going to call back are we setting an exact day and time for the call?
- Presenting The Quote – Are we providing options? Are we quoting just what was requested or are we providing them with all of the policies and protection that they need?
- Asking For The Business – Do we have a closing script that we are using that has a higher likelihood of success?
Mess #6 – No Formal Training Focused on Servicing or Selling Clients
There are not many agencies with whom we are speaking with that have done any servicing or selling training for their staff. We typically have a lot of discussions and training around products and systems. We are very focused on getting our continuing education credits, not for the value of the content but mostly to get the credits needed to renew our license. Many commercial lines producers have been through some type of producer development program but very few of those focused on inbound sales, personal lines sales, or our service team have been given any type of sales training.
We teach people about policy language but not how to interact with clients. We teach them how to quote a piece of new business but not how to present the quote to a prospect. For all of the education, experience, and expertise that we bring to the table, we don’t work with them on interacting with prospects and clients in a positive way. We don’t work with them to understand our brand and how we want them to engage with clients to be reflective of that brand.
Well, that was a long blog! Congratulations if you’ve made it this far. And if you have, you are most likely feeling like some of these messes are in your agency and that it’s a great time to do a Spring Clean-up. Contact me today to discuss our spring cleaning discount on our training programs!
