Take Advance Look at Renewals

While the "quarterback" is designated, many agencies set up teams to handle the renewal and servicing of existing accounts. Whether or not you do this in your agency, it is virtually universal to have some kind of structure for servicing clients.

A typical arrangement for a production team consists of the following:

• The producer–This person should be spending 80 percent of his or her time developing new business and 20 percent on "relationship management"–ensuring that existing clients are cared for, meeting with clients at renewal time and stepping in to solve problems when needed.
• The CSR–Sometimes known as the "account manager," this individual should be spending 80 percent of his or her time on client service and 20 percent on internal functions such as learning, team improvement and training others.
• The technical assistant–The TA should spend 100 percent of his or her time on moving the paper: issuing certificates, ID cards, endorsement follow-ups, memos, checking binders and policies received against what the agency has bound, etc. He also should spend some time on improving technical knowledge to progress on a career path leading to full CSR status.

So who is the most important member of the team? Surprisingly, a case can be made that the TA is the most important because if he or she falls down on the job, the CSR must step in to make sure basic services to the client don't fall into a black hole. Now the CSR can no longer devote the necessary time to his or her functions and, as a result, the producer has to run around doing the things the CSR is supposed to be doing and can't spend the necessary time on new business development. In other words, the whole unit begins to collapse on itself and the agency suffers in its ability to capture new accounts and its reputation for outstanding service.

But in spite of who is the most important member of the team, all must perform their assigned function at a high level to maintain the goal of providing total quality and excellence in client service.
In addition to production teams, there also are support teams–people involved in claims, accounting and administration. Just as production teams should do their best to satisfy the client, the support teams should do their best to satisfy the production team.

Another point to keep in mind: Every team should have a client contact person so everyone in the agency, as well as the client, knows who does what. It might be a different person for different kinds of issues, but the lines of communication and responsibility should be clear and understood by all.

One other issue continues to plague many agencies: poor quality control. Teams have an inherent advantage in this area because tasks can be assigned to individuals within the team while all have a common stake in providing attainment of goals relating to timeliness, market intelligence and integrity of coverage for client exposures. Focusing on quality control in these areas helps smooth over the variation in individual levels of know-how and assure an increasing level of competence within the team for the benefit of the client.

Some agencies have made it a practice to have each area of operations develop and use a statement of purpose or, as some like to call it, a mission statement. For example, a statement of purpose for client service teams might be something like the following:

• Provide an outstanding level of service to existing clients, thereby exceeding client expectations and maximizing potential retention
• Provide internal quality control so that integrity of coverage for client exposures is assured.
• Finally, a way must be found to communicate to senior management the results of efforts in the areas of both new business and client service. A monthly report can be generated easily by the firm's agency management system showing new business by premium and number of accounts, and expiring business renewed and expiring business lost by premium and number of accounts. In a larger agency, this information can be tracked by CSR if desired, and rolled up into agency totals. Information of this kind is crucial in assisting agency owners to measure what is actually happening within their organization.