People Need People: The Golden Rule

Welcome to 2012! I almost entered the New Year on a bad note, but luckily I was able to right a wrong last month…

It was December—the last month of the year. The home stretch. The time we all start to take inventory about the year we’ve just completed and start dreaming about possible contingency checks—if we can only make it through one more month!

Personally, December has always had a special meaning for me: I typically earn between 60% and 65% of my annual revenue between the end of August and the end of December. The last few years in particular had been very good, and things were really starting to look up again. That is at least until early last month.

It was a Tuesday morning in December, and I was hammering out a few emails. My coworker Bridget appeared in my doorway holding a piece of paper and looking as though she’d seen a ghost. I asked her what the problem was and she rather reluctantly handed me a letter to read. It began: “Dear Mike, please accept this as notification that we wish to change our agent of record for our commercial policies that renew on January 1…”

I really can’t tell you what my reaction was; I think I may have gone into some kind of insurance shock! I hadn’t had that feeling in my stomach since my high school girlfriend broke up with me for that tennis player with the nice car.

This client was seriously handing over 20 years of my work to someone else who barely knew their account! I had been with them from the beginning. I watched them grow from a one-location retail store in Mankato, Minn., into a 25-store major retailer with offices in Minneapolis—and here they were, just handing their account over to another agent.

I was angry and confused. What in the world could have happened? What did I do wrong? Did they know how much time I’d spent on their account? Hadn’t we always emailed them back as soon as we got a question or claim? Didn’t they appreciate the risk management tools we’d provided for their managers on workers compensation return-to-work programs, or the employment law seminars we put on? Didn’t they appreciate the time I spent taking their account to the market in order to assure that they always got the best policy available, or the reviews I did on each of their leases to make sure that their coverage coincided with provisions they had unknowingly agreed to in the small print?

The answer to my questions showed up in the next paragraph of the letter: “Mike, I want to thank you for your services, and please know that this has nothing to do with you or your company. It is just that we needed to have someone closer that I could meet with in person on a more regular basis.”

They didn’t hate me or our agency. They just hated the way we were doing business with them. I had forgotten the golden rule that I preach constantly in our office: People need people. This client missed the personal touch that I had provided and that endeared them to me in the first place. I was embarrassed. I had forgotten what makes independent agents different than our competitors. My customer didn’t think I cared about him anymore. I had to get him back.

The next day I got in the car and went to visit this customer. I told him I was sorry and that he had given me a wakeup call that I would never forget! He thankfully gave me another chance with his account, and after we put together a plan to meet personally on a more regular basis, we were good to go again.

I was lucky, but what this experience told me is that no matter what new technology service tools we have at our disposal, nothing ever will replace our personal touch. People need people, and independent agents know that. That is our secret weapon and something we should never forget!