Roughly eight out of 10 of today's insurance producers are "very satisfied" with their work, despite challenging carrier relations, depressed sales and renewals, and agency succession concerns, according to the results of the 2024 Independent Insurance Agent Survey.
Each year since 2017, PropertyCasualty360.com has teamed up with the National Association of Professional Insurance Agents (PIA National) to explore the business challenges of today's insurance producers.
"Agents rely on each other," PIA National CEO Mike Becker said on a recent episode of the Insurance Speak podcast in which he illuminated the value and distinction of this annual research project. Becker added that insurance pros especially value insights that sprout from opportunities "when they're able to [communicate] peer-to-peer."
This year's survey was fielded between Feb. 1, 2024 and Feb. 23, 2024, and it generated about 550 responses. A sampling of survey questions also went out via LinkedIn.
The survey was organized into four sections: demographics, business challenges, finances and technology. The graphics above illustrate respondent demographics along with their attitudes toward the current insurance business environment.
First-person insights
When survey respondents were asked about the impact of hard-market conditions, nearly 70% of them said clients are now amending coverages to adjust to tighter capacity and higher prices. That response was more tempered when PropertyCasualty360.com readers were asked the same question via LinkedIn.
"Independent, retail agents continue to reinvent themselves to serve their clients' needs and continue to be profitable," one survey respondent wrote. "Although the insurance carriers work to be more streamlined in their processes, they appear to want agents to utilize their services and websites versus recognizing that an independent agency provides their clients with choice. There is still work to do to unite agents in encouraging their carriers to provide efficient workflows through the agent's system of choice."
Business frustrations ran high among this year's survey respondents, who described difficulty serving today's policyholders as well as maintaining solid relationships with carrier partners. As another respondent wrote: "I'm extremely happy with my local agency and what we do and how we do things. I'm not very satisfied with carriers as they continue to try to pay us less and bonus us less but put more service and requirements on us. I'd be very happy if carriers did more to uphold their end of the bargain. They keep the bulk of the commissions so they should be providing more service and better quality service and not pushing everything onto the agency, we don't have time for it as people and carriers are more demanding than ever."
A third professional responded: "I will be 69 soon, and I still look forward to getting up in the morning and coming to the office."
And a fourth reflected: "After 45 years in the insurance business it has been a very good career for me. I have never been without a job, laid off or downsized, I have never had problems finding another insurance job if I wanted a change. Insurance is ever changing and is never boring."
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