You Talking to Me?

Posted on by Jason

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.