A Cure for CSR Chaos

When Jim Hair and Pam Stutts set up the workflow for the Personal Lines Department at the Somers-Pardue Agency, they created a daily routine for CSRs—and wrote everything down in a procedure manual.

Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? But consultants say many agencies never accomplish these two critical tasks, stumbling along instead in a chaotic environment that one consultant has labeled “contrived criticality.” In such an atmosphere, every task is a priority, and every priority is high. As a result, CSRs trudge home exhausted, having worked hard, but not nearly as effectively as they could under different circumstances. They may produce $200,000 each in annual agency revenues, but who knows how much more they could do in a more structure environment, or how much longer they would stay in their jobs, with streamlined processes?

At other agencies, management is turned upside down by CSRs who call the shots, telling their managers what they will and will not do. Fear of losing these vital workers reinforces the dysfunction when managers allow it to continue. And CSRs, knowing they have the upper hand, use their authority to keep workflow at a pace and productivity level that they find comfortable.

Stepping In With Standards
No wonder Hair and Stutts swear by standardized procedures and best practices. Having a single, effective method to perform each task eliminates the need for improvisation and puts all CSRs in their department on a more level playing field.

Using their newly reorganized workflow system, the agency’s personal lines CSRs began a contact program to increase customer retention. “With all personal lines business direct-billed, there’s very little contact between the agency and the customer,” Hair explains. Consequently, he says, many agencies lose more personal lines business every year than they write new business.

“We established that we needed to contact our personal lines customers and round out their accounts or add enhancements to their policies,” says Stutts, the agency’s personal lines manager. With more coverage, customers would be less likely to move their business each time they’re offered insurance for a few dollars less.

Part of the Sales Team
Now that account-rounding is standard procedure, Somers-Pardue Agency is taking CSR productivity to the next tier—by transitioning from a purely service-oriented environment to one whose focus is on sales.

So far, it’s working. The agency’s eight CSRs had written 437 new PL policies by the end of June—that’s more than they wrote for all of 2005. And the CSRs are thrilled with their new responsibility. “When we put up the first sales chart, they hated it,” Stutts says. “Now they can’t wait until I post it to see who’s ahead.” Stutts says the key to CSR dedication and productivity has little to do with pulling rabbits from a hat and lots to do with skilled management. “Too many agencies micromanage to the point that their CSRs can’t get anything done,” says Kurt Fickling, president of Fickling Insurance Consultants in Greenville, N.C.

Instead, he says, service employees should be:
• well trained;
• equipped with the proper tools to do their jobs;
• given the authority to do their jobs; • monitored through their activities;
• held accountable; and
• rewarded for productivity.

“Revenue per employee is important, but it’s not the only indicator of productivity,” observes Fickling. And if your agency doesn’t have procedures written down and performance standards in place, you’ll never know how productive—or unproductive— your CSRs really are.

Track Action
Cheryl Koch, president of Agency Management Resource Group in Lincoln, Calif., says an important gauge of CSR productivity is the number of activities they complete in a given day. She prefers to track activities more than revenue or number of accounts handled because, as she points out, a CSR with one high-net account can handle millions in revenue annually. Similarly, a CSR handling 3,000 accounts might appear to be overworked—but if all of those accounts are Business Owner Policies, the CSR might well be underworked.

Monitoring is easy in an automated agency since agency management systems classify every phone call, quote request, endorsement and certificate as activities. Thus, a look at one CSR’s activities may reveal that he or she averages 25 activities per day. But most others in your agency may average 75 or 100. “If someone seems really busy but they don’t have many activities, you need to find out what’s going on,” Koch says. One possibility: they’re overly chatty, spending 20 minutes on a phone call that another CSR could complete in less than five.

One step above activity monitoring is procedure review, and Koch explains why this is important: “It took us a lot of years to figure this out, but we’ve found that adding more people is usually not the answer. When you peel back the layers of the onion and see what’s being done on a CSR’s desk, you find they’re still doing a lot of the paper-based tasks they always did… No one ever told them to stop doing certain things [when automation was added]. So they’re still doing all the paper-based tasks in addition to the automation!”

If paper enters an automated transaction at any point, whether to print a copy of a request to a carrier or document files, “you’ve added another layer of work without taking one away,” Koch says. Not only are you undermining your automation investment, you’re working your CSRs hard when they should be working smart. “We meet some of the brightest and most wonderful people in agencies who feel as if they can never get ahead,” says Koch. “They’re always falling behind, and that’s not a good way to feel.” You can still track and improve the productivity of your CSRs if your agency is not fully automated. But in this case, CSRs handle tracking and supervisors monitor the results.

Not Just the Numbers
Thomas & Thomas Agency Consultants & Appraisers, Inc., has created a workflowprocess form that breaks down every process a CSR performs. CSRs make a mark on the list each time they perform an activity. Roger Thomas, owner and president of the Livingston, Texas, firm, says the chart should cover at least one week so that tasks begun on one day and completed the next can also be correctly monitored. He advises keeping records for three consecutive weeks per quarter to examine any backlog.

But Thomas warns against focusing exclusively on the number of activities each CSR completes. “Not everyone works at the same pace,” he notes. “You may have one who works at break-neck pace, but who is an E&O disaster. You may have another who works fairly slowly, but is meticulous.” One way to manage this problem, he believes, is to provide uniform training to every CSR. To learn more about productivity standards, Thomas recommends reading the Academy of Insurance Producer Studies’ Productivity Series; in particular, the CSR Profile. The profile contains results of a nationwide survey, allowing agents to compare their own CSRs’ servicing volume, job descriptions and compensation, among other things.

Charlie Hoover would agree that every agency is different, but would add that every department is different as well. Commercial lines CSRs at his agency, Moore & Johnson Agency in Raleigh, N.C., handle about $325,000 in revenue each, but they also work with fewer accounts than the personal lines CSRs.

To find out how productive your CSRs really are, know how long it takes to perform each activity and monitor the number of activities each one completes per day. Compare the numbers you collect to statistics published in various surveys of agency activity, and then make adjustments as necessary to increase the daily activities.

Train, monitor and reward CSRs, but also keep the tools coming. “With automation, you can’t take six months off,” says Hoover. “You have to stay up to date with the latest version of your system, embrace upload and [maintain] an environment that frees your [CSRs] to work with your customers.” That means examining each new tool or process to see if it can help improve your CSRs’ productivity.

And remember: you don’t always have to work harder to improve your productivity. Sometimes the most effective way to do a task is also … the easiest.

Susan Hodges (hodgeswrites@aol.com) is an IA contributing writer.

Rewarding Your CSRs
Pam Stutts drew colors on a white envelope, inserted $10, and placed the envelope on the table in front of her at a weekly CSR meeting. No one said a word about it, so Stutts took it with her at the end of the meeting and placed it on the desk at the next meeting.

As the conversation drew to a close, one CSR timidly asked Stutts if she planned to mention the envelope. Stutts chuckled, told the woman she appreciated her asking, and handed her the envelope, explaining that it’s just as easy to ask for the business. “Our CSRs just needed to be encouraged to ask about it, just as they need to ask clients about all of their coverage,” Stutts says. Having made her point in this positive way, Stutts’ CSRs became eager to inquire about clients’ coverage needs because they understood that they would be rewarded in one exciting way or another.

Are you motivating your CSRs to cross-sell? If not, why not? Rewards can be as simple as a free meal or as elegant as a trip to a spa. Since different types of rewards appeal to different people, you may want to ask your CSRs which they would enjoy most: a gift certificate to a nearby shopping mall, an afternoon off, a free lunch or an appointment at the health spa. Then hand out these awards each month or even each week to those who have produced the most new business or retained the highest
number of accounts.

In all likelihood, it won’t be long before those rewards are more than paying for themselves.

Claims in the CSR Camp?
Moore & Johnson CSRs don’t handle claims. All claims are processed by a special claims person who is on call around the clock to take claims information and provide guidance and counsel at the time of loss. “It really pays off,” says Hoover, agency president. Although claims emergencies occur only five or six times a year, Hoover says customers want to talk to their someone at their agency. By calling a special 1-800 number to report claims, customers can go directly to the claims processor’s extension and leave a message. Within two hours, the claims processor calls back, takes the information and files the claim. “If something happens on Friday night, we don’t want our customers to sit and simmer until Monday morning,” Hoover says. Maintaining a specialized claims processor not only gives customers a real person to talk with when a claim occurs; “it also allows us to increase our policy count or revenue in the business,” says Hoover. The agency has employed a claims specialist for more than 15 years, and Hoover highly recommends it. CSRs are free to handle more service work and cross-selling, while the claims specialist develops close relationships with claims adjusters.

Barriers to Productivity Carrier Requirements
Depending on which carriers an agency represents, its CSRs may have as many as five different methods for completing an activity. To add an endorsement, for example, a CSR may have to leave the agency management system and plug into the carrier’s Web site. Another carrier may require a CSR to request the change by sending an e-mail from your agency management system. Still another carrier may require that an e-mail be sent, but that it must originate from the carrier’s Web site. “The simplest endorsement, such as changing an address, can have multiple iterations, depending on the carriers,” says Cheryl Koch. “Sure, it’s all automated,” she admits, “but it’s making the CSR less productive.”

E-Mail Addiction
You’re reviewing a client’s coverage when you hear that little ding announcing a new e-mail message. Do you stop what you’re doing to read and respond to the e-mail, or do you keep working, knowing that you’ll check all e-mail at a specified time later that day?

How your CSRs answer this question tells much about their productivity, Koch believes, because “e-mail addiction” can be used to delay other tasks that may be more important.

“We treat e-mail like phone calls, as if each one were critical,” Koch says. Instead, she recommends managing e-mail as you would other forms of mail—something to be tackled at certain periods of each day and each week. “We tell clients not to turn on the sound in their computers so that they aren’t notified each time they get an e-mail,” she adds. She suggests checking e-mail no more than four times a day and prioritizing messages for response.

Then manage expectations. You might send an automated response to lower-priority e-mails, for example, telling senders that you will respond to their message within two or three business days. Respond to higher-priority e-mails at one of the specific times you set aside to process e-mail each day.

Time Stealers
Has your agency equipped all CSRs with their own printers? Do they leave their desks to send or receive a fax? How many scanners are available?

Reluctance to spend money on these items can keep your CSRs from reaching peak productivity. Printers, for example, cost $150 or less apiece. To fax from your desktop may be as simple as turning on the feature in your agency management system or installing software. And while you may not need scanners at every desk, if your CSRs must wait their turn to scan, your agency needs more scanner capacity. By investing modest amounts to acquire these capabilities, you increase CSR productivity