Tag Archives: communication

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Thriving in Difficult Times

It’s hard to read the headlines without thinking about the future of your agency. Many agencies wonder what business will be like over the next 12 to 24 months. Due to the soft marketplace over the last couple of years, insurance agencies have already had to create plans to address lower premiums—and thus, lower revenues.

Premium reductions continue to average about 12%. As sales volumes are reduced and as businesses cut back on payroll, you can expect further reduction in premiums. I am not an investment wizard, nor can I predict the future. Still, it seems likely that agencies will continue to see reduced revenue over (at least) the next 12 to 18 months.

This may sound like doom and gloom, but it’s also an opportunity to face the situation head-on and create a plan to survive these difficult times.

Following are a few suggestions to get you thinking about how to create a strategic plan that will move your organization forward during the next 12 to 24 months.

Communicate with clients: Many of your clients have the same concerns as you about how current economic conditions are going to affect them. Now is the time for you to be proactive. Provide extra information and services that will help them manage their businesses better. Partner with a local CPA to provide a seminar on cash flow management. Seek companies that can help your clients with their marketing programs. Basically, do anything possible to let your clients know that you’re an advocate for them. This will go a long way to build loyalty with your clients.

Marketing: Acquiring new clients has always been an important part of running an insurance agency. Now, it’s even more so. Explore new target marketing niches. Explore new marketing tools that are available, such as using the Internet to attract prospects and look for new revenue sources. Agencies that continue to foster a sales-focused mindset seem to be able to grow regardless of current economic conditions.

Back office: Make sure that you are as effective and efficient in your back office operations as possible. Concentrate on getting any technology projects that are currently underway finished as soon as possible. Utilize all the tools available to streamline operations. Don’t allow staff’s resistance to change to derail projects.

Staff training: This is one of the least expensive options available. Make sure your staff is fully trained to use your existing hardware and software systems.

While times are certainly challenging, independent agents have shown again and again that they are resilient and can weather most storms. It won’t be easy. But continuing to maximize your technology investment will go a long way to help you weather the storm.

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Adding Instant Message Capability

Are your clients able to communicate with you any way they want—whether by phone, e-mail, Web, call center, or live access? Instant Messaging (IM) is an option that is becoming easier to implement. Understandably, agencies are often concerned about the practical aspects of IM. How will the conversation be documented? Is it worth the time?

One service worth considering is Provide Support, a software and Web process that provides a “Live Chat” option on your site. You are given code that enables you to add a button on your site that a client can click to start a live chat with someone in your office. You select individuals who become part of a chat rotation. When someone clicks on the Web button, a box pops up on the computer of the next person in the rotation. That person is responsible for the instant message conversation.

The price depends on how many users you add. One user costs $99 annually, three users is $200 annually, and 10 operators is $400 annually. The software provides a transcript of each conversation after the call is finished, along with a management recap at night.

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Make Cell Calls on Airplanes

Israeli company Aerophone Ltd. has developed a communication system that enables telephone calls to be made from airplanes—independent of GSM/CDMA ground stations. The system supports all wavebands and requires neither prior written registration of the passengers nor a particular billing system. Calls cost $1.60 per minute and are invoiced via the normal mobile telephone bill.

The development has been made possible by the installation of so-called picocells (miniature GSM stations) in airplanes, as well as by servers and transceivers that link to telecommunication satellites and receiving stations for the Ku band (Kurtz-under band: a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum in the microwave range of frequencies). The picocells in the immediate vicinity of passengers automatically reduce the energy output of logged-in mobile telephones to a minimum so they don’t have negative effects on the aircraft electronic systems.

Installation and operation of the Aerophone system is free of charge for the airlines. While I applaud the continued development of technology, as a frequent flyer, I am not thrilled with the idea of listening to phone conversations while trapped on a plane.

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“Click-to-Call” Provides Instant Connectivity to Qualified Leads

VimoLive Click-to-Call is a new service that immediately connects insurance brokers to consumers in their area who are seeking health insurance. Millions of visitors currently access Vimo for health insurance comparison shopping information, and now have the option to click a button and talk to an insurance broker in their geographical area, free and instantaneously.

Many people prefer talking to a live human being when it’s convenient for them, rather than completing a form and waiting for a callback. The immediacy of response makes this solution incredibly strong.

Here’s how it works. When the prospect requests a live conversation, VimoLive rings the customer’s phone, and immediately starts searching for an available agent in the customer’s area. If the first agent selected by Vimo’s expert system does not pick up, the system will keep hunting until it finds an agent who does. Additionally, brokers will be able to track and annotate all of the calls they receive through VimoLive’s online lead tracking system.

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Learning to Manage Email

Communicating with someone used to be easy. You could simply pick up the phone and give them a call, or sit down and write a note. Fast forward a few years and you now have the Internet making it easy to type an electronic message from your computer or your cell phone. This massive change in how we communicate with others has taken place in a relatively short period of time. Many agents now tell me that e-mail is their primary means of communicating with most clients.

Yet this new communication option has introduced problems into the agency workflow. In fact, I believe that sending and receiving e-mail is currently the biggest drain on productivity for many, if not most, agencies. People are surprised when I make this comment. They contend that e-mail has made it quicker and easier, and takes less time than other forms of communication. I agree with them, but only up to a point.

The problem, as I see it, is that we are allowing e-mail to manage us instead of learning to proactively manage the e-mail that we deal with every day. Like any new form of communication, we need to learn how to use it as an effective tool. Some of the problems I see with e-mail include responding to e-mail as soon as it comes into your Outlook inbox and reading an e-mail but, because we don’t know what to do with it, we leave it in our inbox.

Because paper and fax have been around as communication options for some time we have learned how to manage them well. We can take some of those same principles and apply them to e-mail. Here are some ideas you can use to help everyone start learning to manage e-mail like any other communication.

1) Turn off all notifications for when you receive a new e-mail. There are very few e-mails that are received by staff in an agency that have to be answered immediately. With alerts turned on every time a new e-mail arrives the natural tendency is to switch over to your e-mail client and read the new e-mail. If you’re in the middle of a difficult task your concentration is broken and it will take a few minutes for you to figure out where you were and get started again.

2) Train yourself to review e-mails on a consistent basis. If you’re not being notified when new e-mails arrive, you need to make sure you go to your inbox on a consistent basis to review the new e-mail received. A friend of mine, a CEO of a large corporation, recently decided that he would only answer e-mail twice a day, late in the morning and before he leaves for work at night.

3) David Allen, author of the book “Getting Things Done” (highly recommended), suggests that when you are processing your new e-mails you follow this rule. If you can answer the e-mail, or take other action required in two minutes or less, go ahead and answer the e-mail immediately. If it will take longer than two minutes then move the e-mail to a pending folder to work on later. You then review the pending folder at a predetermined time to complete the work. This allows you to complete easy e-mail and concentrate on more difficult tasks when you have the time.

I have followed this advice to try and better manage the large volume of e-mails I receive. I strongly recommend that you begin experimenting with ways to better manage e-mail communications, both for yourself and your staff. You’ll be less frustrated and your clients will experience better service.