How did you get into insurance?
My father worked as an insurance wholesaler, so I gained exposure to the industry at a very young age through his mentoring and experience. There were even a few memorable times when my father allowed me and my brother to skip school to help him prepare policy packets as a child.
During high school, I became a licensed agent, and I quickly starting onboarding my teachers as new personal lines clients. I was a student athlete and had hopes of playing basketball in college, but an injury my senior year of high school sidelined those plans. Instead, I decided to take what I learned about insurance from my father and start an agency.
My brother, Carlo, joined a year or two after the agency’s founding, and my three sisters joined us shortly after. My father works with us in a wholesale capacity and continues to be a valuable mentor. He has given us the leeway to try new things, even when not all our past experiments have been successful.
How do you approach your agency differently as a young agent?
First off, everyone shops online. In turn, our digital presence is incredibly important. We want an easy-to-use website that is SEO-optimized. We rely on Google and Facebook reviews to validate our service to a prospect. We are also a Dave Ramsey Endorsed Local Provider, which provides additional validation. As a family-owned business, we have created a great culture that our clients have come to appreciate, and we’ve used technology to share that culture with others through the digital networks we have established.
We also facilitate communications with new and existing clients by supporting as many digital channels as possible, including our website’s live chat feature. This can be helpful for qualifying leads, and allows us to start a dialogue with a prospective client at their convenience. We provide each Streetsmart client with a customer portal experience where self-service capabilities are made available. If they need help accessing documents or making a change, we are a phone call away, available 24/7.
What are insurers doing right with technology?
I have seen new business capabilities for agents being offered by some insurers that have caught my attention. One insurer has intelligent pre-fill and can flag the SIC code based off the company’s name. For instance, Tom’s Floral is likely a florist.
A different insurer texts the quote to a client. The client can pay and bind the policy themselves. Removing these transactional activities allows the agent to be a resource for the client, guiding them through the process and educating them about their risks.
These are both examples of features that allow me to be efficient and improve the overall experience for new clients.
How could insurers better to serve you as an agent?
I’d love to see an independent, rapid-rater ecosystem where agents, brokers, and carriers can work together to make all lives easier. Typically, agents are working with a policy and coverage structure that the client has already established. With the technology available to our industry today, we should be able to create a better customer experience at renewal. If an insurer is taking a rate change or loses its appetite in a certain line of business or territory, the agent should easily have insights on other insurers that likely have interest in the risk. Ultimately, this would help us sell more policies and improve our retention.
As an industry, we also have to consider that clients are becoming more comfortable with technology. For instance, my father’s preferred channel of communication is text. We are even having clients that previously dropped off payments at our office now utilizing our customer portal for these transactions. Both agents and insurers will need to anticipate customers’ growing adoption and build capabilities and processes to match.
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