At least once a month we encounter an agent with the unique problem of losing more customers than they’re gaining, even though they swear that they provide superb customer service.
The typical symptom is a high number of customers leaving for non-payment of premium. Often the agent doesn’t even know that a customer is gone until they run into each other at a function. Or worse, the agent doesn’t find out until the customer’s file winds up in the 'dead' group, to be filed away. Typically, agency service employees don’t call or question the reasons for non-payment cancellations. The result: other agencies promising superior service lure clients away.
Often the agent and staff feel that customer loyalty is no longer prevalent. 'The customers have changed,' they tell us. In fact, it’s the agency that’s changed, slowly but surely, without the agent noticing. The personal touch that was once the norm has now become the exception.
Agents admit that they don’t feel as in control as they once did. 'After all,' they rationalize, 'we have to give up control as we get larger. There’s no way I can pay personal attention to thousands of customers.'
That’s true. However, 'paying attention' doesn’t mean answering every phone call and talking to every customer. The definition has changed to controlling the quality of service provided by the agency’s staff — developing and managing employees with the work ethic and service expectations that agency principals used when providing service themselves.
MANAGING QUALITY CUSTOMER SERVICE
It takes a unique individual to convert from a 'doer' to a 'manager.' You must make sure that your employees fulfill all customer service requests at least as quickly, courteously, and accurately as you would. This process begins with training, continues with managing and monitoring, and concludes with client feedback.
Training isn’t only for new employees and inexperienced insurance people — it’s for everyone and should be ongoing. If you do the same thing often enough without re-training, you get stale and the quality of your work and service tends to drop. Training that assures quality customer service includes active listening skills and customer relation techniques.
Role-playing is one of the best methods of training. Identify problems and objections that clients bring to the agency. Take turns playing the customer and the CSR while addressing the problems and objections. As the agency owner/manager, you’ll quickly notice the responses that make you cringe. However, if you use the session as a clinic with ideas of how to address problems and issues, your staff will develop ways of handling customer issues.
Managing the process means knowing the numbers: new business versus retention. Use your percentage of referral-generated business as an indicator of your quality of service. If most of your new business comes from marketing campaigns and advertising, you might have a quality problem that keeps clients from referring you. Customer retention is simple. How many customers do you have at the end of the year? Identify your lost customers and the reasons why they left weekly. Perform the same calculations and analysis on lost policies (even if you retain other lines for the customer). The 'reasons' are your most important indicator. Staff meetings should include a reiteration of 'customer stories' that arise for every employee from time to time. Re-telling the stories reiterates the need for quality service and educates all employees on how to manage issues and problems.
Monitor the results. Share victories and losses with the employees. Some agents feel that lost prospects or customers might lower morale. Or their injured ego prevents them from sharing the bad news with their staff. Your employees are all adults. They buy homes, manage their households, and are perfectly capable of sharing victory or defeat from an analysis of your agency’s performance. This process makes them feel valued as members of the team. Respect will make employees more loyal to you.
Ask clients for feedback. Want to know if you’re providing good service? Ask your customers at every opportunity, not just when good things happen. Make customer surveys a part of your agency operations.
Provide feedback to employees. Good or bad, tell your employees what customers are saying. Use all feedback as a learning experience. The first time you criticize an employee as a result of feedback, you’ve lost the battle for their loyalty to you and to quality service. From that moment on, they’re more concerned with saving their jobs and covering their backsides than with saving customers and covering yours. Ask them what they could’ve done differently that might’ve changed the results of the contact. This turns criticism into a learning experience, without blame or accusations.
I’ve never met an agent who said, 'We give our customers mediocre service.' Agents pride themselves on operating a high-quality servicing agency. There might be no basis for this beyond the comments of their employees or the laudatory comments of a few customers each year. Those agents who 'walk the talk' can prove their quality customer service through high retention rates (95% or above) and a high and growing rate of new business generated by customer referrals.