Although most agency owners agree that talent managementis important, few are able to execute it right because they of timeissues related to human resources, training, routine administrativeduties, and monitoring tasks. Similarly, employees don't have timeto focus on their highest-value activities due to the plethora ofroutine and mundane processing tasks that fill their days.

Talent management is tied to revenue production, which meansproducers must be free to produce revenue and CSRs free to servecustomers and cross-sell accounts. To accomplish those goals,agencies must find a way to eliminate tasks that do not maximizethe value of each employee's talents and core competencies;otherwise, you are managing task performance rather thantalent.

Although it helps to increase automation use to improveefficiency and reduce errors, this involves costs related tohardware, software, program updates, continual training, and themanpower assigned to input the data. And while process improvementprograms can help, few Lean Six Sigma workflow analysts and consultantsspecialize in insurance agency operations.