How you work determines how well your systems work.
Not the other way around. Most agencies operate in a decentralized way. This makes sense as different lines of business have different requirements, workflows and needs. Issues arise when this gets out of control. Optimizing and standardizing business process doesn’t mean loss of flexibility and in most cases actually makes life easier for individual colleagues. Developing good business process is required to implement good technology.
Break Away From the Norm
Every agency starts with the same structure: Stack service teams behind producers. As producers grow their books their service teams grow. The problem is this only creates a unified customer experience for clients under a single producer. As a firm grows how do you ensure that every client is managed by the team with the skills and experience that fits them best? Is the colleague placing a risk the most qualified colleague in the agency to handle that risk?
The Economics of Best Practices
Many firms think about optimal business process solely from the perspective of controlling internal cost and increasing Revenue per Employee. While this is a desired outcome the greater economic impact of creating optimal best practices is creating optimal client experience. When you unify your experience across all lines of business you create consistency for your clients while removing hassle and friction. This leads to increased account rounding (managing more existing polices for a client), up-selling (adding new lines of coverage a client has never purchased) and cross-selling (acquiring cross-departmental business). We can help you make it easier to work with your firm.
Change Management
Agency executives often avoid internal conflict surround account management in a desire to not ‘wreck the machine’. Many talk about how their service teams are change-avers. In fact most service employees aren’t resistant to change, they are resistant to change that makes their jobs harder. In our experience working with service teams across more than 100 brokers we’ve found that while agency colleagues outwardly express a desire to left alone to service clients they inwardly wish for a system and process that more clearly defines how service issues are to be handled provided that the best practices 1) meet their needs and 2) provide flexibility to handle outlier issues. In fact, this is the goal of best practices. It’s simply not possible to box a set of agency practices that can be used be all. The process is iterative and tailored for not just each agency but for each internal department. Working with an experienced team to define these practices is the key to success.
Mobilize Your Workforce
One of the greatest benefits of a cloud approach is the ease of developing a mobile workforce. The legacy method of providing laptops to only producers and executives needs to change. Every employee of your agency would benefit from the ability to move and work freely around the office, meetings, at client locations or from home. A single experience whether inside or outside the office is truly transformational. If your firm can’t provide this you will find yourself at a serious disadvantage as your staff continues to retire. Attracting generational talent requires a different way of approaching the work environment. A cloud approach makes this approach feasible to all agencies.
