You Talking to Me?

We have seen a consistent root cause of many productivity and teamwork problems at independent insurance agencies over the past couple years — A LACK OF CONSISTENT INTERNAL COMMUNICATION.

Take a step back and put yourself in the position of a consumer, or better yet, think about your investment advisor (or financial management firm) for a moment.  If you called with an issue one day and then called back a few days later to continue the discussion, you would expect the person to whom you were speaking, even if it was a different representative, to know what you had talked about in the first call.  If you had to start over or if the second person had no idea who you were or what your issue was, that would cast a pretty negative light on that investment advisor in your mind, wouldn’t it?  

So why would you tolerate the potential for that kind of treatment of your insureds? 

In contrast to the example above, a customer-focused firm most likely has a system in place by which notes from calls (including who took the call and how the problem should be resolved) are available to every employee who might interact over the phone with customers.  This is a reliable and efficient way to keep everyone at the firm on the same page and to ensure that clients perceive a seamless and well-integrated operation.

Wouldn’t it be great if anyone on your service team could take a call, pull up an insured’s information, and see all the previous communication and policy adjustments on that account?  I hope a lot of you right now are thinking, “Wow, Jason, have you ever heard of our agency management system?!”  Of course!  And that is exactly one of the main ways it should be used.  But I do have to say that at a fair number of agencies with whom we work, taking a call from an insured and answering questions or resolving issues immediately is still not a smooth process when the employee taking the call is not the regular account or service representative.  It becomes even worse when there is a dedicated sales staff gathering information and communicating with a prospect or new client.  There seems to be an inherent communication gap between sales and service.  This is not good for business!  Of course, the functions of the two are quite different, but easy communication between them is crucial to writing new business … and keeping it … especially at the time when the prospect or new client is handed over from the sales team to the service team.

So think about how well your teams communicate.  Do they meet regularly?  Are they exchanging emails, applications, and other forms?  Are they putting relevant notes into your agency management system?  If not, they are hurting your productivity and your ability to function as a team, and when the client experiences the communication gap, it could very well hurt your bottom line.

Tell us how this works at your agency, or if you see it as a problem too.

What Works and What Didn't

The marking of the New Year is an opportunity, and I hope some of you already have been doing this, to look back at what worked well for you over the last twelve months.  And, you should also be looking at the other side of things – what things did not work well for you.  These two criteria are very important in making the coming twelve months better than the last.  And that should be the goal, making things better than they were, in keeping with a continuous improvement mindset.

From your use of agency technology to your marketing and relationship-building efforts, take an honest and deliberate look at what worked, what didn’t and how you can use the results of both to make this coming year more successful for you and your agency.  It could be something as simple as figuring out if that new functionality in your agency management system can make your workflows more efficient, or it could be a much more elaborate effort such as creating a new marketing strategy that reinvigorates the relationships you have with your clients (and I swear I did not pick these two examples to mirror some of the work I have done with agencies over the past year, really!) 

In either case, the most important part is to do something.  You have a year more of experience.  Unless you went through it with your eyes closed and your iPod cranked up, you learned, observed and had successes and failures.  The only thing that would negate any of that would be to do nothing differently moving forward.

I, for one, will continue to look at most new technologies as they come out (or become more mainstream) and evaluate whether or not they are something that an agency could leverage to make their day-to-day work easier, more effective or help them to improve their bottom line.  Just because a new technology may promise some great results, it is always worthwhile to gain perspective and understand if it really is worth the time and resources to implement, train and utilize when it comes to the gains it may provide your agency.

From all of us at BHBCo, we wish you a productive, exciting and rewarding – both professionally and personally – New Year! - JHH