Tag Archives: survey

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How Do You Rate? Take the 21st Annual Agency Productivity Survey

Digital consumers continue to redefine what they consider to be “good customer service.” Increasing the productivity of your staff seems to be an elusive goal. In order for your organization to keep ahead, it’s important to make sure you evaluate how existing technology tools are being used as well as determine what additional tools have become available.

This agency productivity self-test is published each year in my newsletter, The Anderson Agency Report, as a way to help measure how well your organization is using technology resources. Hopefully, it also provides ideas about new tools that you might want to incorporate into your workflow.

The self-test delves fully into your use of technology in the following categories: Management, Administrative, Infrastructure, Sales, Customer Service, and Communications.

Everyone is encouraged to participate. The audit self-test will take you approximately 15 minutes to complete so set aside some quiet time to complete the survey. It’s well worth it.

We’ll provide the results so you can tell how your agency compares to others who took the survey. This year’s survey is only available online by going to http://www.taareport.com. As a little extra incentive, everyone who completes the survey will be entered into a drawing to receive our course, The Personal Lines Ultimate Marketing Program—a $500 value.

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Small Business Owners Dismiss Risk of Data Breach

As the number of data breaches involving smaller businesses continues to grow, a new survey by The Hartford finds 85% of small business owners believe a data breach is unlikely, and many are not implementing simple security measures to help protect their customer or employee data.

data breach

“Most of the business owners surveyed believe they are not at risk, when in fact smaller businesses are increasingly being targeted,” said Lynn LaGram, assistant vice president of small commercial underwriting at The Hartford. “As cyber criminals set their sights on smaller firms, it is important for business owners to take proactive measures to protect data and minimize the likelihood of a breach.”

The Hartford Small Business Data Protection Survey found that business owners varied in their adoption of eight data protection “best practices” to help reduce a business’s risk of a breach:

  • Lock and secure sensitive customer, patient or employee data—48%
  • Restrict employee access to sensitive data—79%
  • Shred and securely dispose of customer, patient or employee data—53%
  • Use password protection and data encryption—48%
  • Have a privacy policy—44%
  • Update systems and software on a regular basis—47%
  • Use firewalls to control access and lock-out hackers—48%
  • Ensure that remote access to their company’s network is secure—41%

The Hartford survey also found that nearly two-thirds of business owners believe a data breach violates trust and would jeopardize their relationships with customers, patients, and employees. More than a third say they have a more negative opinion of companies that have recently experienced a breach, based on the companies’ handling of the breach.

About a third of business owners say they would have difficulty complying with government notification requirements, and nearly half acknowledge it would be impossible for a small business to completely safeguard customer, patient or employee data.

“Given the potential business and reputational costs of a data breach, it’s also important for business owners to have insurance in place to help them respond and recover quickly and effectively in the event of a breach,” said LaGram.

The Hartford Small Business Data Protection Survey of 501 U.S. small business owners with fewer than 50 employees was developed by The Hartford and fielded by the Pert Group in January 2012. Margin of error is +/- 4%.

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Will We Ever Go Paperless?

A national scientific telephone survey conducted by Poll Position found that 56% of Americans said they don’t think the United States would ever be a paperless society, while 20% said yes, one day we’ll all go paperless. Twenty-four percent of Americans were undecided or had no opinion on the question.

paperless

paperlessThe 18-29 age group had the strongest opinion and 63% said the United States would never be a paperless society and 23% said we could be a paperless society. Results from men and women were similar, with 56% of men and women both saying we could never be a paperless society.

Poll Position’s scientific telephone survey of 1,142 registered voters nationwide was conducted December 6, 2011, and has a margin of error of ±3%. Poll results are weighted to be a representative sampling of all American adults.

Poll Position is a unique non-partisan news, polling, and social media company founded and led by two award-winning CNN news and polling veterans. More information is available at www.pollposition.com.

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Dreading Watching Another Presentation?

A new study from online presentation software company, SlideRocket, found that Microsoft PowerPoint is one of the most difficult and least engaging pieces of office software. Over 30% of respondents reported falling asleep during a PowerPoint presentation. Of those, almost 20% have said they’ve fallen asleep so many times that they’ve lost count.

SlideRocket presentations

The survey of over 1,000 working adults found that the most frustrating features of PowerPoint include excessive text on slides, boring graphics, lack of analytics, and large file size. This dread and frustration extends to both sides of the presentation, as survey data indicated that 33% of respondents dread creating a PowerPoint, while 29% dread sitting through a PowerPoint presentation.

According to the survey results, PowerPoint presentations are so dreadful that folks would rather do other miserable things than sit through one. Respondents said they would rather do the following miserable activities than sit through a PowerPoint presentation:

  • 24% would forgo sex tonight.
  • 21% would rather do their taxes.
  • 20% would rather go to the dentist.
  • 18% would rather work on Saturday.

Despite PowerPoint’s bad reputation, presentations are the most commonly used business tool, second only to email. The all too common expression “death by PowerPoint” and these new survey results underscore the fact that it is time to say “rest in peace” to the old world of presentations and embrace a new way of presenting that engages audiences and brings big ideas to life.

SlideRocket provides an online alternative to PowerPoint. SlideRocket’s platform includes interactive capabilities such as audio, video, rich media, and instant feedback to capture the audience’s attention, regardless of time or location. The HTML5 mobile player powers presentations anywhere, from any device, enabling mobile professionals to deliver the perfect pitch with smooth transitions, crystal clear videos, and animations that stay true to design.

You can also import your presentations from PowerPoint, access them from anywhere, and even create them online or collaborate on them with your team members. If looking for inspiration when creating a presentation, you can browse through SlideRocket’s professional presentation gallery to see examples. There is a free trial or a limited free version so you can experiment to see if this would be a better presentation tool than PowerPoint.

SlideRocket presentations

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The Ultimate Question

For any business, but especially a service-based business like insurance agencies, the ultimate (and most important) question to ask customers is, “How likely is it that you would recommend this company (agency) to a friend or colleague?”

The Ultimate Question 2.0

According to Fred Reichheld, by asking this question you identify detractors, who tarnish your firm’s reputation and readily switch to competitors, and promoters, who strengthen your company with positive word-of-mouth and help generate profitable, sustainable growth.

The Ultimate Question 2.0The evolution of customer service and brand loyalty is a topic that has captured the imagination of Fred Reichheld for over 20 years. In 1996, the Bain Fellow published his first book, The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits, and Lasting Value. Recently, Reichheld (along with co-author, Rob Markey) published a newly updated version of his 2006 seminal book, The Ultimate Question (now titled The Ultimate Question 2.0). A business’s ability to not only understand the answer to this question, but to benchmark their success, led Reichheld to create and champion the Net Promoter Score System, which companies now use to define how much love their consumers have for them.

In this latest book, Reichheld provides a cohesive, comprehensive, and cost-effective management system that has three central components: categorizing customers into one of three categories (i.e. Promoters, Passives, and Detractors) through a simple survey, creating an easy-to-understand score based on that categorization, and finally, “framing progress and success in these terms, thereby motivating everyone in the organization to take the actions required to produce more promoters and fewer detractors.” In other words, your agency can have a way to track and understand your customer loyalty. Is it improving? Or declining? Once you recognize the trend, you can take steps to improve interaction between internal staff and your customers.

I first heard of this concept while listening to a podcast interview of Reichheld. After listening to the interview and reading the book, it strikes me that this is, as he states, the ultimate question—especially in today’s environment where consumers have a voice like they’ve never had before.

Agencies can no longer just sit back and assume that they are building loyal long-term customers. Everyone has more options today than ever before. It might be painful to ask the ultimate question and find out where your customers rank you on a scale of 1 to 10. But without this beginning benchmark you will have no idea what you need to do to increase customer loyalty, and ultimately long-term profits.

The book details the fundamentals of the Net Promoter System, including how to ask the question and measure the results. Part Two provides guidelines on how to implement this process within your own organization.

I highly recommend you get the book and begin asking The Ultimate Question and measuring your progress.