Technology Decisions: 3 Paths to a Happier Staff

The role of IT is changing.

A few years ago, Leif Hurst, director of IT at CoVerica in Dallas, realized he better start “doing something with data that generates revenue, instead of waiting for something to break,” he recalls. “We’re not managing devices and things anymore—we’re managing to make sure the process is still working.”

And the most important part of that process is the people who keep the trains running at your office, because one of the biggest hidden costs of implementing new technology at your agency is training staff members on how to incorporate it into their daily lives.

“You’ve got staff who now have a new system who have no clue how to do their day-to-day processes,” says George Robertson, principal at Rockingham Insurance in Eden, North Carolina. “You have to train them, and you have to think through that process.”

“Agencies are full of humans,” agrees Kris Hackney, executive vice president of customer experience at Applied Systems. “Another key thing to keep in mind in addition to technology budgeting and your own appetite for digitizing your agency is asking yourself, ‘How do I make my people ready for this as well? How do I prepare them for the change? How do I make the appropriate change management embedded in the process that I go through?’”

Here are three tips to keep in mind when involving your staff in your agency’s technology decisions.

1) Recruit cheaper. Mark Harrison, agency operations and systems manager at NBT-Mang Insurance Agency, headquartered in Norwich, New York, says making technology work at your agency is ultimately about “trying to get the best person to do the best job for you at the lowest amount you can pay them.”

Whether it’s hiring a college student who’s looking for an internship or outsourcing some of your IT essentials, “assess what your true needs are, what your true wants are as it relates to technology, and then do that cost/benefit analysis to make sure you’re not overspending on something,” Harrison suggests.

One of Hurst’s strategies is to hire college juniors and seniors who are studying computer science or information systems to tackle specific projects at the agency. “As an example, right now I’m looking for a video editor because I know we’re about to start doing tons of social media video stuff,” he explains. “I might hire someone at 15 hours a week, so for what I could go out and hire another IT person for, I could hire three interns and pay them $12 an hour.”

It’s a great deal for college students if you’re able to be flexible and accommodating regarding scheduling. “That’s one of the biggest things for them,” Hurst says. “If you call me that morning and say you went on a bender last night after studying all week for an exam, I don’t care—school’s first. The thing that matters to me is that the projects get done.”

Bruce Winterburn, vice president of industry relations at Vertafore, says this strategy is particularly worthwhile when it comes to areas in which your current agency staff may not excel. “More and more agents are starting to look at individuals who can build a social strategy for them—maintain a relevant network on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,” he says. “Building a social strategy is one of those things that’s rapidly becoming table stakes, but it hasn’t been an expense most agents have incurred in the past.”

Where does the money come from? “Do you need a Yellow Page ad or your traditional drop mail anymore? Maybe you can take part of that expense and hire a college intern to make sure they set up all your social outlets and monitor them on a regular basis,” Winterburn suggests. “You can’t just take your drop mail piece and put it on the web and expect it to work. You have to bring in some new blood.”

Doing so benefits not only your agency and the young people who are grabbing a great career opportunity, but also the industry at large. “At the end of the day, we’re introducing more young people to insurance,” Hurst points out.

2) Stay flexible. Rockingham recently acquired an agency on the other side of its community of about 16,000 people. In order to get the most bang for his buck and improve customer service across both offices, Robertson decided to implement a voice over internet protocol (VoIP) phone system.

Since then, Robertson has discovered that using VoIP offers a hidden silver lining for staff flexibility, too: “Let’s say we have a bad storm—all the office phones could be routed to employee cell phones,” he says. “Or somebody could actually bring the VoiP to their home, plug it in and it would ring to that extension at their home.”

Using technology to empower a remote workforce can extend beyond the idea of disaster recovery. At CoVerica, 63 employees are spread over six states, and the average age of a personal lines producer is 30. “We’ve got staff I’ve never met that we support remotely,” Hurst says. “With such a young workforce coming in, we’ve got people who just want to work whenever they can, regardless of if they’re here in the building or not.”

When one of CoVerica’s commercial lines producers was due to return from maternity leave, “we had a serious talk where we asked her, ‘Would you want to just spend the next year at home with your baby? For what you do, you can do it at home,’” Hurst recalls.

The idea of remote staffing took off from there. “If we need to hire a CSR, why do they need to be within 25 miles of our office?” Hurst points out. “We’ve got amazing CSRs that are in little rural towns who were coming from an agency that hardly paid them anything. All of a sudden we look really attractive—it’s no different than what you’ve got now, except you can work for a big firm in Dallas, you get to stay home and see your kids when they get off the bus and you get to make more money.”

Hurst, who has two young children and coaches Little League, says CoVerica has now morphed into a “results-only organization” that measures success based on “whether the job gets done. We’re not sitting there looking at the clock trying to figure out when to leave, when to come in, who’s five minutes late—none of that really matters here.”

3) Test it out. Hurst uses test groups of two to five employees to experiment with new technology ideas. “I’ll get them to adopt the technology, try to fold it into the workflows, try to break it, and then have a talk about it—is this something we want to move forward with?” he explains.

The goal: to build cheerleaders. “If six service reps see that Amanda’s using this new software and now she gets to take her computer home, two, three days a week, all of a sudden everyone’s like, ‘When can I get that?’” Hurst points out. “They don’t look at it as, ‘Shoot, I’m getting a new computer and all my stuff’s going to be gone’—this valley of despair. It’s always going to get worse before it gets better, but once you build those advocates, that stuff goes away.”

Test groups are a win-win for management, too, because they turn potential disasters into minor disruptions. For example, Hurst had an idea to start delivering all quotes via quick YouTube videos for clients who are tough to get ahold of: “If a client isn’t returning your calls or emails, just text them a YouTube video.”

Leadership loved it—but CoVerica’s producers didn’t. “I was getting feedback from them like, ‘Look, this is taking me twice as long, I’m right in the middle of a video and my phone’s ringing and I have to get that call,’ so all of a sudden we had all these other issues,” Hurst says. “This stuff costs money, it takes time, you have to train all your producers, and nobody took to it.”

But because Hurst tested the idea with five producers instead of all of them, he reduced the cost of technology failure—and left the door open for future attempts. “It’s not ‘no,’ it’s just ‘not now,’” he says. “This may be something we can revisit a year from now when the technology gets better.”

Jacquelyn Connelly is IA senior editor.