Top Tips to Retain and Gain Talent in Your Agency

We talk a lot about client retention, but not enough about retaining your own agency employees.

I wanted to address this, as the trend shows that employee retention, not to mention new talent attraction, has been a challenge for the industry.

Recent studies indicate that employee churn is rising while the talent pool is shrinking.

What that leads to, and you might have experienced this, is a constant cycle of being short-staffed and having to re-hire and re-train over and over again.

While this isn’t a problem we can solve overnight, it is something your agency can directly address and make strides in improving on your side.

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The challenges with hiring and retaining talent.

There’s one seemingly uncontrollable factor that is impacting agencies, and that’s employee retention.

But, if we look deeper into the proverbial problem, we’ll see the connecting threads that lead toward agency employees looking elsewhere for work.

Why agencies are seeing an increase in employee turnover.

Let’s start with the catalyst for this in the first place. According to Agent for the Future, the cause is that 87% of agency employees reported increased workloads. Depending on the role, this can come in many forms across an agency.

But part of the cause is also the impact of people leaving the industry—that work has to go somewhere, and reallocating work while hiring and training to backfill a position isn’t always ideal.

With that increased workload leads to burnout, with 51% of respondents in the Agent for the Future article saying they felt burnt out, which leads to a 2x increase in their likelihood to leave their job or, worse yet, the industry itself.

How a declining talent pool impacts agencies.

That, combined with a decline in qualified job seekers in the industry, means agencies also have less talent pool to pick from.

According to a study by Vertafore, they noted a 20% decline in referrals from people within the industry, meaning less people in the roles are recommending it to others who are looking to enter another job market.

All of this to say, your agency might have experienced this, and the trends are pointing toward a continuation of these statistics.

However, at the ground level, there are strategies your agency can use to find opportunities to grow and retain your team. Let’s get into it.

When it comes to growing and maintaining your team, there are four key strategies you can look to make impactful changes that result in a noticeable impact over time.

These four strategies involve offloading repetitive work from your team, consolidating the technology your team uses, streamlining systems to make client self-service more efficient, and, at a company level, providing more flexible schedules.

1. Use AI and automation to offload repetitive work.

Each week, your team spends countless hours on tasks that are repetitive, routine, and necessary but not impactful. That’s the key to pay attention to.

While these things need to get done, they aren’t necessarily the actions your team takes to move the needle forward. These might include:

• Drafting responses to questions about policy rate increases.
• Sending out policy renewal reminders.
• Data entry from form fills for quote and service requests.
• Following up on client milestones or inquiries.
• Creating audience segments for marketing or client communication use.
• Writing welcome emails to every new client who signs up.

These are just some of the many examples that I’ve heard agencies commonly complain about as taxing, time-consuming work that needs to get done, but keeps their agents and CSRs away from what matters most—client relationships.

By implementing AI and automation into your agency’s workflow, let me show you how you can take those common examples and lead toward saving your team members each 10+ hours per week.

With AI and automation, you can:

• Generate an AI-generated email response and template for commonly asked questions, such as “Why are my rates going up?”
• Use an automation system to pull from your AMS and automatically send policy renewal reminders to clients 1, 2, and 3 months ahead of the policy renewal date.
• Streamline form submissions to automatically populate a sales or service pipeline to enable your team to manage quote and service requests.
• Set up automated marketing campaigns that target specific audiences to send emails, texts, and direct mail during key client milestones or even as immediate follow-ups to actions taken.
• Use AI to create a targeted audience segment from your AMS data to use in outreach for marketing to your book of business.
• Implement an automated marketing campaign that triggers when a new client signs up and is added to the AMS for timely onboarding communications.

With AI and automation, I want to underscore not just how much time your team can save, but also how much time they can reallocate to activities that grow your business and build client relationships.

That’s where these technologies that do a lot of the busy work for you actually let you be even more hands-on and involved with your clients than ever before.

2. Smart consolidation of technology.

Insurance agencies are increasingly using technology. On the surface, that’s great! On the other hand, technology can often be a barrier to hiring new talent due to increased training requirements or clunky systems and double-entry your team must handle to get work done.

On average, agencies use 12+ technology systems in their day-to-day. To put it into perspective, that’s:

• 12+ logins that your teams need to remember.
• 12+ tools you need to train each new hire.
• 12+ systems that likely don’t integrate and require double entry.

When we break down what exactly these tools are, we see that many agencies use (or should be using) the following:

• Agency Management System
• Quoting Software
• Website
• Live Chat
• Texting
• Marketing Automation
• Lead Management
• Video
• Generative AI
• Lead Generation/Self-Service Forms
• Reputation Management
• Social Media
• Team Collaboration
• Task Management

You might be looking at this list, saying, “But I need all of those tools to function.” To that I say, I 100% agree. However, there’s one missing piece.

The functionality of each tool is essential, but this is where smart technology consolidation comes to the forefront. By that, I mean how you can move from 12+ tools that each do one thing really well to 3-5 tools that cover everything your agency needs to succeed.

Let’s take the list I just shared above. What if you could break that down into a short list of actual technologies?

For example, Agency Management Systems are a must for agencies to manage data and grow their business. They often will also incorporate quoting software that allows your team to streamline the binding process. They may be able to perform a few other functions as well, but these functions can be consolidated rather than requiring a separate technology.

Things like team collaboration software, like Teams or Slack, and task management, like Monday, Asana, or Calendly are on their own island. Sometimes, these are roped in to AMS, other times, they need to be their own separate tools. And that’s fine, because systems like these can do that function very well.

The greatest opportunity for consolidation lies in your marketing tools and systems, as well as your online presence. To use our insurance marketing platform as an example, it can do 10 of the functions I listed above in one single platform:

• Website
• Live Chat
• Texting
• Marketing Automation
• Lead Management
• Video Tools
• Generative AI
• Forms
• Reputation Management
• Social Media

With Agency Revolution’s platform, as you can see, agencies are able to easily consolidate nearly a dozen functions (and certainly more than I listed here in my example). This means less room for error, fewer double-entries, and a simpler onboarding process when you have less technology that does more.

3. Streamline client self-service options.

Client requests, like quotes and service inquiries, are essential to any agency. It’s exactly what you’re trying to get to grow your business and build relationships.

But having too much of that work front-loaded onto your team is where problems can arise, especially with increased workload and burnout in roles where client communication is a primary part of the job.

What if that work could be streamlined for your team, thereby reducing your team’s workload?

That’s where integrating self-service options can make an impact. In fact, having the autonomy to manage and make policy requests is a common expectation of insurance clients. They want to report a claim or request a COI on weekends, even when your agency is closed.

Self-service options, mostly in the way of lead generation forms on your website, give the opportunity to have that initial request be handled on the frontend.

And, on the other side, that’s where automation and automatic follow-ups can be used to provide an immediate response and set proper expectations.

Let’s go through a scenario that involves a self-service approach, and as we go through it, note how few of this involves input from your team.

In this example, a client visits your website after hours and needs help. Here’s what they do:

• Your client needs to report a claim from a fender bender they were involved in.
• They visit your website and find your report a claim page.
• They complete the form and submit it with all required information your team needs.
• They get an automatic response thanking them and letting them know their agent will be in touch by the next business day.
• The form entry adds a lead to a service pipeline your agency has in place.
• The agent reviews the form entry and uses the lead as a task to follow up and manage the service request.

Throughout this experience, you can see that it not only takes work from your team when a client makes a request like this, but also that the automations in place handle much of the repetitive work and data entry, freeing up time and capacity.

This empowers your team to be more proactive while focusing on the right conversations and engaging with clients who reach out with questions or need help, rather than tracking down clients who need to renew their policies.

4. Offer flexible schedules to incentivize your team.

When it comes to how your business operates, every agency is different. However, over the past 5 years, we’ve seen an increase in agencies offering remote and hybrid work options. In addition, we’ve worked with agencies that also offer their employees flexible work schedules to balance work and life.

To be transparent, Agency Revolution does the same thing here, to great effect. We offer flexible time for sick days, PTO, and every other Friday off. These perks are great at boosting team morale and offer a flexible work-life balance.

How this relates to your agency is directly tied to how these incentives naturally expand your talent pool while also retaining your team.

On the subject of growing your available talent pool when hiring, if you are able to offer remote or hybrid work, or even simply flexible schedules, you’ll find more qualified talent who might otherwise not be top of mind.

Opening up who you hire means more people will want to work at your agency. It also creates more opportunities for candidates who live farther away or need time before or after work for child care, while remaining just as qualified as other candidates.

Another way to view this is as an employee retention tool that fosters an environment where your team thrives and maintains a work-life balance. Overall, this is a strategic yet beneficial change your agency can make to help grow and strengthen your team over the long term.

Next steps your agency can take.

Making strategic changes to your business can take time, but there are steps you can take in the short term to make a lasting impact.

The first step is to audit your existing tools and technology. You might be surprised by how many tools and systems you are using. Beyond that, check with colleagues at the agency to see whether other departments have different technologies in place.

From there, you can work toward a smart consolidation strategy, identifying platforms, such as Agency Revolution, that can handle multiple necessary functions in one place.

After consolidating technology, prioritize AI, automation, and client self-service within your portfolio so you can begin implementing the strategies I mapped out. Typically, by consolidating your tech stack, you’ll find you’ll gain these features in the process of shifting to new systems (or simply taking full advantage of the tools at your disposal already.

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Want to learn more?

If you’re ready to take the next step, our complete insurance marketing platform offers the tools and features your agency needs to stand out and succeed.

From marketing automation that keeps you connected with clients and boosts retention, to insurance websites designed to drive growth, and a suite of marketing tools to meet your needs, Agency Revolution is everything you need after your AMS.

Learn All About Our Complete Insurance Agency Marketing Platform