According to the 2013 Insurance Operations Best Practices Survey, conducted by ReSource Pro Analytics and Insurance Journal, producers and service staff aren’t spending their time the way they think they should.
The Productivity Gap
83% of survey respondents said that producers should be spending less than a quarter of their time servicing or troubleshooting accounts; yet only 30% respondents are actually spending less than a quarter of their time servicing or troubleshooting accounts. The remaining 70% of respondents report producers are spending over a quarter of their time servicing and troubleshooting, keeping them from selling.
Service employees find themselves in a similar position. 60% of respondents say that service staff should spend over half their time directly interacting clients; yet only 28% of respondents are able to spend more than half their time interacting with clients.
The Opportunity
According to ReSource Pro CEO Dan Epstein, the findings in the survey represent “a huge opportunity to improve productivity.” Patrick Armstrong, Vice President of Business Development, offers a means of closing the gap: “an agency can… create a process that makes it very easy for the producer to rely on the service staff to do what the service staff does best… it starts with having a process and then managing the adherence to the process.