Should I Include Staff Bios on My Insurance Agency Website?

In general, I think the most effective bios are the ones that support your agency ‘brand’ and unique value proposition (the things that make you demonstrably different and better than competitors). Suppose for a moment that your brand and UVP include these general attributes:

• Professionalism
• Service
• Personal Relationships

A lot of agencies throw around attributes like those above, but have a hard time backing the words up, or describing what they mean. Staff bios can help. For instance:

• Professionalism – Continuing education, designations, and awards all back up and help explain this attribute; so it’s not a bad idea to include that information in staff bios.
• Service – There are two kinds of service, and the first type has no place on you bios since it does nothing to promote a brand or UVP that would differentiate your agency. The second kind of service merits consideration for publication. I would lump services into two categories: meeting minimum customer expectations, and exceeding expectations. Returning phone calls on a timely basis and processing transactions accurately are both expected. If you don’t measure up, you have a problem; but if you do meet these expectations, you don’t get any extra credit. On the other hand, if you have producers, account managers or CSRs, whose job it is to ‘meet with at least 5 customers a month to review their protection needs’ (annual review) that kind of information can be compelling in a bio. Likewise, individual situations where an agency staff member has found better insurance protection for a customer or helped out in a claims situation will make the ‘service’ component of your UVP tangible and meaningful. Inclusion of these little stories in bios is worthy of consideration.
• Personal Relationships – I read an article a few years ago about medical malpractice lawsuits that pointed out the relationship between average time spent with a patient and the incidence of malpractice lawsuits. The condensed version is that doctors who spent more time with patients were sued less often. That is, those doctors who bothered to build some kind of personal relationship benefited by spending less time in court and paying less for their malpractice insurance. Patients, and people in general, will cut you some slack if they like you; they will also be more likely to refer people to you. You definitely don’t want to be gratuitous in presenting personal info in an online bio; be sure any personal information you provide through staff bios actually represents and supports the kind of relationships you have and want to build. And you definitely don’t want to jeopardize anyone’s safety by putting too much personal information on your website. So this one requires some careful thought, but there are very good reasons for including this kind of information.

Active vs. Passive Bios
You may also want to think about how you might use your online bios. For example, you might want to include links to bios as part of your proposals to prospects (here are the professionals that will be your risk management team); or you might want to routinely include a link to a CSR or Account Manager bio as part of a new business ‘welcome package’, or when there is a change in service assignments.

Are Your Agency Employees Blogging? Should you care?

Your employees might just be inadvertently representing your agency while bouncing around on any of several social networks (LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.). Does your insurance agency need a policy regarding blogging, 'Facebooking' or Tweeting on Twitter? The New York Times seems to think they need one, and here it is:

* Don't specify your political views. This includes joining online groups that would make your political views known.
* Don't write anything you wouldn't write in The Times on your profiles, a blog, or as commentary on content you share.
* Be careful who you 'friend'. Since this is a tricky subject, The Times suggests that its reports "imagine whether public disclosure of a 'friend' could somehow turn out to be an embarrassment that casts doubt on our impartiality."
* Using email addresses found on social networks to contact individuals is fine but the standard rules apply: treat the person fairly and openly and don't "inquire pointlessly into someone's personal life."
* The Standards Editor must be consulted before contact is made with a minor.

A complete article about the NY Times and their social networking policy can be found at Econsultancy (head up courtesy of WOMMA).

Liabilities and Exposures Created When Agency Business Email is Forwarded to Personal Accounts

I have had several insurance agency managers and owners tell me recently that they have employees who prefer to forward business emails to personal accounts because they are more comfortable with their personal email service, or they want to work at home and the agency doesn't have or permit web mail access to the agency email.

You cannot stop agency employees from forwarding emails to themselves, but approving of the practice can create some risks for your agency.

• Emails sitting on home computers can potentially be viewed by any family member; and especially where the family includes kids, by friends of family members. It is inevitable that private client information will be contained in some of these emails. Allowing employees to forward business emails creates privacy violation possibilities.
• You have some control over viruses when employees use business email,but not so much when personal email is used. What happens when your employees’personal (business email) transmits a virus that crashes a client’s business email? The possibilities are gruesome and numerous.
• Permitting employees to forward work emails to personal accounts can allow individual employees, over time,to amass a good deal of account information in a repository outside of the agency. That provides a great big hole in any measures you may have taken to protect proprietary account information, and can make it easier for an employee leaving the agency to take accounts with them.
• What about allowing only ‘trusted employees’ to forward business email to personal accounts? Unfortunately, the precedent set can allow another ‘less trusted’ employee to forward email and then claim they didn’t realize the policy regarding forwarding emails was selective.

Employees may still forward emails, but random monitoring of outgoing email should alert you to an violations of a policy against forwarding to personal addresses.

Your Insurance Agency's "Community" Reputation

I have long encouraged agents to take control of their online reputation. Monitoring feedback left by others at various online rating and search services is a must. Encouraging positive feedback is even better.

I recently concluded a purchase on eBay (where buyers and sellers are sometimes referred to as the 'EBay community) and received an email soliciting not just my direct feedback, but also a request to rate my experience via the eBay seller rating function. Here's the email (names omitted to protect the innocent:

Thank you for your purchase from Business Name Omitted.

We received note that your order has been delivered and would like to verify that you are satisfied with your purchase and our service.

Please reply to this email if there is anything that would keep you from giving us 5 stars on all ratings. We'll do what it takes to make it right.

If you are satisfied we would highly appreciate it if you would leave us positive feedback with 5 stars on all ratings on eBay. Please use this link: Direct Link to eBay Rating for Seller Omitted.

We have already added positive feedback to your ebay profile. Your feedback can be viewed at:
Direct Link to my eBay Profile and Rating Omitted.

If you have any questions you can either reply to this email or call us at Phone Number Omitted.

Thank you for your business,
Business Name Omitted

Taking a cue from this approach and using a version of this email after every agency sale, renewal, or claim will deliver multiple benefits. First, you will be systematically probing to be sure your customers are happy and will be building stronger relationships (aka, less price sensitivity, more referrals). Second, you will far outstrip your competition in the number positive reviews your agency has at Google Maps (local search), Yahoo Local, Yelp, etc. All you have to do is insert the direct link for rating at those services into your standard email, similar to the example above.

The Insurance Annual Review Challange

I  was recently asked if I had any statistics about insurance agencies who performed annual client reviews.  I do (somewhere), but lost interest when I couldn't turn up anything after ten minutes of folder foraging.  But I did run across some stats from which you can reasonably extrapolate the kind of results your insurance agency might get if you performed annual reviews.

• 83% consumers want an annual review – NAIC Survey
  
• 90% want all their insurance in one place – Progressive Survey
  
• 6.8 is the average number of insurance policies per household; most agencies average less than 2 (this includes life, health, disability, an agency should have an interest in these other products that are out there – 

Selling other insurance products, such as life insurance, can actually improve the retention rate of other products the agency sells. A 1998 report... showed that the retention rate of automobile policies improved when the customer purchased more than insurance from the agency.

The retention level improved from 61 percent to 83 percent in policy year five when a customer purchased three or four products from the same agency. The rate improves from 44 percent to 75 percent in year 10 and from 35 percent to 71 percent in year 15.

Yet, the percentage of American households who own multiple lines of insurance from the same agency remains small. Only 6.9 percent of all households have purchased p-c and life insurance products from the same agency, LIMRA reported in that study.  National Underwriter, 2003, Issue #2)

Of course, there are reviews and then there are reviews. The content and positioning of a review questionnaire should follow the objectives the agency has for the activity. I recall visiting a large agency service center a few years ago when they were sending out renewal questionnaires. At the time, the response rate was about 30% - respondents overwhelmingly asked to be re-quoted to see if the agency could get them a reduced premium.   I’m sure someone around there has a bad taste about that still.   There was a problem with the questions the agency used on the questionnaire.  Customers seemed to think there were one of two outcomes:  either the agency was going to sell them more stuff thereby increasing my costs, or they were going to make the agency re-quote my policy to reduce my costs. 

Effective review formats consist of questions to turn up potential gaps that may not be addressed in standard policies.  An online format can be sampled in an Annual Review Wizard from Confluency Solutions (request a review if you want to try it out).  The Wizard asks what has changed and puts the agent in a position to follow up with suggestions to adjust insurance protection for those changes. This format is focused on creating opportunities to discuss other products and capture more policy relationships – a follow up is necessary in a process like this, and an agency needs to know it has capacity for the activity that will be generated.  But a review can be an effective account development and retention tactic.  You just have to have a little faith in my extrapolation...or maybe you have some results of your own you wouldn't mind sharing?

Easy Updates to Your Insurance Agency Blog

An easy way to make sure you update your insurance agency blog is to use RSS feeds to have potential blog content and ideas pushed to you. You can riff on information provided for you, but be sure to put some kind of unique spin on it. What does the information mean to businesses and consumers in your market area? Could you expand on some key points?

If you don't know what an RSS feed is*, you owe it to yourself to check it out. RSS feeds can be quickly and easily set up to 'push' content from most news, blog (and other websites) to a RSS reader of your choice (Google Reader, My Yahoo!, etc.).

One feed you should definitely set up is to the Insurance Information Institute's blog. They post regularly, and often include statistics and study related information that can be effective in your agency blog.

By the way, you can set up an RSS feed to this blog, and if you take the plunge and set up an agency blog, you should definitely encourage others to set up feeds to your insurance agency...

RSS in Plain English*

Blogs in an Insurance Agency Ecosystem

Blogging remains a foreign concept to many insurance agents and many larger businesses as well: only 12% of Fortune 500 Companies are using blogs in their communication mix. But smaller companies have caught on to the business benefits of blogs. A recent estimate put the number of business related blogs at over 850,000. Unless your insurance agency has an active blog (or two), you are missing on an effective and virtually free way to get more customers, quality control information you provide to consumers,and increase website content and generate more site traffic (i.e., even more new customers).

One tool, one tactic, and a multiplicity of benefits. What are you waiting for? The trick is to find a way to take a concept unfamiliar to many insurance agents (blogging) and embed that concept in your agency practices in a way that quickly breeds familiarity.

Here is how a blog might fit into an agency ecosystem:

1. Blog set up with all producers and CSRs with ‘author’ permission (that is, everyone can post to the blog).
2. Your insurance agency web administrator monitors your blog weekly

Scenario:

• Customer calls or emails CSR or producer with a question.
• CSR or producer determines if question is account or customer specific, or applicable to a broad cross section of customers or prospects.
• If the question is account specific, the CSR or producer can answer the question via email or on the phone.
• If the question and answer have broader applicability, the CSR or producer post the Q and A to the agency blog, then email the blog post linkto the customer.
• Agency website admin reviews blog posts weekly; content is edited for accuracy, etc. Some content, with small modifications, can be moved to the agency website as an FAQ or article.

In the above scenario, the blog posts substitute for email content, and they present little extra effort. Responsibility for blog content is distributed across all staff vs. becoming a burden for one person; and by extension, responsibility for website content refresh is also shared. The blog would be a resource first for individual customers and insurance agency staff, and later, a resource for a wider audience, either as blog posts or edited posts migrated to agency website content.

Someone in the agency will have to review content for quality periodically; this is probably not being done now (with emails and phone conversations), and would constitute an additional task. But quality reviews are a good practice for a number of reasons. Using a blog as outlined above makes quality control possible in a way that would be far more difficult to manage with emails and phone conversations alone.

I can see some objections to inserting a blog into daily communications, but all objections will basically boil down to this consideration: Blogs and other Web 2.0 tools are routinely used by other businesses, and growing number of consumers - especially Generation Y. Is your agency willing to adapt to new communication tools to improve agency service and acquire new customers, or are you satisfied with the status quo? If capturing new customers and improving the quantity and quality your agency can deliver for basically no cost are objectives for your agency, then there is really no valid objection to blogging.