How did you get into the insurance industry?
After leaving school, I took a job selling cars. I learned a lot from the experience, but I knew I did not want to build a career as a car salesman. Nationwide reached out to me about a position in their associate agent-builder program, where I would focus on personal lines. The program helps train young people through a six-week crash course. After graduating the course, we were given aggressive outreach and sales goals.
My early success opened additional opportunities, where I received an introduction into commercial and farm lines. At a networking event, I met an agent who had been successful writing commercial business. I began asking him questions to learn more about his work. At the end of the event, he offered me a spot on his team. The man who gave me my start is now my business partner in RWR WV, a full-service independent agency. We have three folks focused on personal and another three individuals focused on commercial.
What do you see as technology’s role in insurance?
Starting my agency, I had a strong grasp of the sales and management side of the business. I recognized in the short term we needed a CRM to build strong account management practices.
There are opportunities for technology to be leveraged to increase the speed and accuracy of writing business. During the renewals and quoting process, there are times where data entry must be duplicated (e.g., rekeying a client’s address). Streamlining this process and sharing data between forms would make my life easier.
I also believe there are opportunities to help position agencies to offer more value-add services to their clients. These services could help strengthen relationships with clients, leading to retention.
Can you speak about your experience when partnering with carriers?
Being a scratch agency, earning appointments can make or break your success. In turn, we partnered with an established regional agency that helped us obtain key carrier appointments that allowed us ramp up quickly.
Predictive modeling has led underwriting into discrete answers: either yes or no. Working with carriers that are willing to learn more about a potential account is critical. Sharing my client’s story and providing the business’s history can provide some evidence of the quality of the risk. This dialogue can occur when trust is established.
In turn, we encourage all our carrier marketing representatives to come meet us in person. We want to create that relationship. We are interested in insurers that are finding ways of underlining the agency’s value proposition by offering risk management programs to policyholders.
How do you approach partnering with your clients?
Besides my agency, I own and operate commercial properties. When I became a buyer of insurance for my commercial real estate business, I saw firsthand where gaps in the customer experience exist.
Reflecting on my experience led me to implement new processes in our agency to help better serve our clients. Our agency recently earned a Net Promoter Score of 98.50, which ranked us as the top commercial lines agency in the publication.
We believe that meeting with a client provides an opportunity to educate them on insurance, and our clients enjoy learning about the nitty gritty. Very few agencies take the time to teach how an experience mod works. These learning moments help us build a close relationship with our client.
For the claims management piece, we have back-office support that utilizes a third party. This is a resource we invest in for the benefit of our clients. A client may have a claim experience once every 20 years, so it is often an experience that is unfamiliar. We deal with claims every day, so we try to make the process as simple as possible. Our clients have a direct claim number to report the first notice of loss. We can then shepherd them through the process.
Ultimately, our goal is to be viewed like a CPA. A CPA files a company’s taxes without the owner needing to worry about the process. If we do our job effectively as insurance advisors, our clients can remain solely focused on their business, and we will find the appropriate insurance solution for their business.
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