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Last Updated on: December 28, 2020

Stop Providing Customer Service!

Look, if you’re a producer and you’re out there offering good customer service, I hate to rain on your parade, but your book is at risk. Do you think I’m crazy? You think you got the best customer service in the industry? I’m going to tell you otherwise!  Read on!

Certificates can be an Awesome Client Experience

Listen, I know you think I’m nuts, that if you’re giving customer service that you’re destroying your book. You have to understand my perspective. Customer service is the expectation. It doesn’t differentiate you from anybody. To be different, you have to do whatever it takes to provide an awesome client experience. What’s the difference, you ask? Well, I can give you several examples. Customer service is getting certificates turned around in a timely fashion, “We’ll get you your certificate in the next 24 hours.” “We’ll get your certificates in five hours or less.” Whatever your stick is. An awesome client experience? “We offer our clients a self-service portal where you’re able to get your certificates of insurance in real-time. You can have them in your customer’s hands faster than you can type an email and send it to our firm requesting it. We do this because we understand exactly how important certificates are here.”

Prep Them for Their Audit

Do you want another example? Let’s talk about audits, “What we’re going to do is we’re going to negotiate your audit as best we can. We’re going to be here for you to make sure that you’re prepared for it, and then we sit with the auditor when they audit your policies.” Great. Guess what? They’re still going to owe money at the end of the year. What did you do proactively? Maybe that’s posturing for customer service.  Real client experience is: “Yes, one of the things we do (because we understand that audits are such a problem with people in your industry) is:  my firm has created a spreadsheet.  The spreadsheet provides a place where you can key in your sales or payroll every single month, and it’s going to compute your actual insurance cost for that month. Not only does it let you know if you’re trending higher or lower than what you’ve projected, but you can also use it on a job by job basis as you’re bidding to make sure that your insurance cost is not going to lead to you not being as profitable as what you would like.”

What are you Doing in Your Agency?

See people; you have to realize something. We sell insurance, right? That’s what we fundamentally do. How do you differentiate yourself? “I’m going to sell insurance for you, real good man.” No, that’s not how you do it. You have to think outside the box. You have to come up with new ways of doing things, to provide that awesome client experience. That’s going to differentiate you from everybody else. Otherwise, you’re not solving problems. You’re hocking products, and that’s what insurance salespeople do. We don’t want to be insurance salespeople. We want to be producers, and we want to focus on things that other people aren’t. Just like we talk about total cost of risk when it comes down to discussing the numbers, we don’t want to provide customer service. We want to provide an awesome client experience. I know there are a lot of you out there that follow this content that are doing wild stuff right now, which makes your agency stand out.

You Aren’t Competing Against Other Insurance Agencies

I’d love for you to shoot me messages and let me know the things that differentiate you in the marketplace. Because right now, I can assure you Amazon and Google are working very, very hard to provide an awesome client experience when it comes to insurance transactions. See in their mind it’s a convenience. They want people to click a button when they’re in buying soap and toilet paper, and they want to offer you homeowner’s and auto’s quotes. And all you got to do is click to look at them, and click to buy. They’ve got your payment information, and they have your family’s information, they know everything they could know about your household. The one thing they can’t do is they can’t follow up. They can’t provide awesome client experiences after the fact. Take the time, invest some time right now to determine what’s going to make your company’s client experience so fantastic that everybody raves about it and refers you to all of their friends and colleagues. If you can do that, if you can dedicate that kind of time, you’re going to kill it, Commercial Insurance.

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For most of my 20-year career, captives felt like something reserved for the insurance elite—the jumbo accounts, the Fortune-level operations, the companies with multimillion-dollar manual premiums and entire departments dedicated to risk management. If you had asked me ten or fifteen years ago whether a $250,000 account was a legitimate captive candidate, I would’ve laughed. I thought captives were reserved for companies so complex and so large that the only rational way to insure them was to build an insurance company around their risk.

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