By Thomas A. McCoy

The service side of the agency business has reached a new level of importance in the last two decades. Agency owners, predominantly sales-oriented by nature, have become better business managers and have realized that business retention is just as critical as new business. Hence, they see the work of their CSRs and CSR managers as critical to the agency's bottom-line results.

In tandem with this increase in stature, CSRs have come under pressure because of increased business processing demands. The market swings--from hard to soft and back to hard again--have had an enormous impact on CSR workloads. At the same time, new technologies have brought new efficiencies, but also have raised expectations from agency owners and clients.

We asked two executives who manage CSRs in large, progressive firms--Joan Ditmar of Universal Insurance Services in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Elizabeth Allen of Rue Insurance in Trenton, New Jersey--about some of the issues surrounding their customer service responsibilities. Each has more than 20 years of agency experience in customer service. Each exudes the same enthusiasm for customer service that she seeks in the service people she hires.

In their respective agencies (both former Rough Notes Marketing Agencies of the Month), the owners prefer to use the title "account manager" rather than "CSR." Each firm has elevated the status of this position in a number of ways. Perhaps most significantly, each has a system of partially linking the account manager's compensation to business retention.

Ditmar and Allen agree that today's hard market presents special challenges for their account managers. However, each executive, working with her agency management, has structured the account managers' responsibilities and compensation in a way that minimizes hard market difficulties.

"The account manager is under pressure to get renewal quotes and get coverages placed," says Allen. "Underwriters are requiring a lot more information and detail than they ever did in the past. The account manager goes back to the producer to obtain the information, and the producer gets frustrated. The account manager is caught in the middle trying to satisfy both the underwriter and the producer."

In many agencies, she says, "The producer's success usually winds up meaning just more work for the CSRs. We've tried to overcome that by creating incentives so the account managers want to do more for the producers. All of our account managers have individual goals that are tied to the production and retention of the producers they serve. Their goals are linked. So the producers' success has a financial impact on the account managers' success, which I don't think happens in a whole lot of agencies."

Universal Insurance Services takes a similar approach. "We continually investigate ways in which account managers can share in the success of their producer's book of business," Ditmar explains. "A producer will reduce his commission percentage to share with his team of service people. We, in turn, tie this into our agency goals, one of them being our overall goal for an increase in agency revenue. It creates a win-win situation whereby new business is not seen as added work but as added revenue."

The UIS account manager's compensation package "is tied into what we call the 'critical success factors' which drives their profit sharing at year end as well as their annual performance review.

"Each year in the past," Ditmar continues, "the producers would sit down with our marketing manager and managing partner and draw up their production goals. This year we expanded this process to include our entire High Performance Team, which included the account manager, the producer and the commercial services manager (me), and one of the owners or members of the production management. The four of us talked about the goals, put them in writing, and both the account manager and the producer signed off on them. We're all on the same team."

Putting this teamwork philosophy into practice, both UIS and Rue send account managers out to visit clients. "Although we recognize that the producer or owner has the relationship with the decision maker, there's also another valuable relationship that can occur between the account manager and the account manager's counterpart at the client," says Allen.

"The 'trusted advisor' relationship between agency and client can happen at more than one level," agrees Ditmar. "We have account managers who go out to the client on their own, both for pre-renewal and renewal calls."

Both UIS and Rue also provide account managers with a budget each year to spend on building relationships with underwriters or clients. How is it spent? "Send a cheesecake. Send flowers to someone who really helped you out in a crunch or take a client to lunch," suggests Ditmar.

The owners of Universal Insurance Services and Rue Insurance believe that with the increased responsibilities they give their account managers, it makes sense to relieve these service professionals of some of their workload. Each firm has created separate job descriptions--at Universal it's an account manager assistant; at Rue it's a tech team--to fulfill this role. One might expect the employees in this assistant's role to be less experienced employees who have yet to completely learn the ins and outs of customer service. Not so.

"We have what would qualify as four and one-half account manager assistants," Ditmar explains. "Three of them were previously full-time account managers. They made the decision to work on a part-time basis and spend more time with their families.

"At Roger Sitkins' online training for CSRs, one of the first things he says is that you should recognize where your skills and abilities are. There are people who are completely comfortable processing the paper. They like being behind the scenes. Then there are others who would rather have interaction with the client. They enjoy the dialog, the phone calls, the interruptions left and right. We had an individual in our office who was a front-line account manager who came to us and said, 'I'd really be more comfortable assuming the role of the processor because that's where I thrive.' Is that a step backwards? Of course not. By shifting responsibilities, you can get 100% out of a person instead of 80% when the individual isn't maximizing her real talents."

"The account manager assistants are doing everything that CSRs were doing five years ago," Ditmar emphasizes.

At Rue Insurance, "We have a tech team unit similar to Universal's account manager assistants," Allen explains. "A few people on that team have 15 to 20 years of experience. Either because they prefer business processing to working with customers, or because they don't want to work full-time hours, they serve as our technical support."

Account managers at UIS are assigned to handle the book of business of individual producers. "We've had such growth in producers' books of business that we pretty much have a one-on-one situation with producers and account managers," Ditmar explains. "When the book grows, we can introduce a technical assistant to help the account manager and a second account manager if needed. We have three or four producers now with books of business over $1 million in revenues, and each has two account managers assigned to them, plus in some cases an assistant."

Occasionally, she adds, a producer's book of business is not large enough to justify assigning an account manager, so two or three producers can share an account manager.

At Rue Insurance, account managers and producers are matched up in similar fashion. But on commercial accounts under $25,000 in premium, there is no producer involved with the account. The account manager works with the client, utilizing the service centers of Travelers, Hartford and Selective.

When hiring account managers, Ditmar uses outside testing services from Caliper and Kolbe. The Caliper testing is helpful, she says, in identifying an area where the prospective employee may be weak. She then probes that area with the job candidate. She finds the Kolbe testing useful in deciding if a prospective hire would match up well with a particular producer--utilizing Kolbe scores from both parties.

When a prospective account manager is looking over the benefits at UIS, the listing of one particular perk probably tells the job candidate a lot about the demands of the work, as well as the agency's concern for its employees. "We provide a massage therapist who comes into the agency twice a week," says Ditmar. "It definitely is a talking point with prospective employees."

Both UIS and Rue Insurance hire account managers with experience--generally at the CISR level--and they expect their education to continue. Each agency has numerous CICs on its service staff, and some are working toward CPCU.

The two agencies use outside consultants, including The Sitkins Group and PLC Associates (Penny Ciaburri), to bolster their customer service efforts. Allen and Ditmar travel twice a year, along with their agency owners, to Sitkins Group private client group meetings where they serve as liaisons between agency ownership and their service teams. In the office, the account managers at both agencies are enrolled in Sitkins' monthly "CSR On Line" training.

"Our work with The Sitkins Group has been invaluable when it comes to the sales process," says Allen, "but our work with Penny has helped our organization, agency wide, to feel that we're all playing for the same team. "She's helped with leadership abilities, communication skills and problem-solving skills throughout the organization. Some people have these skills intuitively, but Penny has helped others within the agency to learn these skills. It's encouraged everyone to provide more open feedback for the good of the agency as a whole."

Joan Ditmar and Elizabeth Allen worked in all phases of customer service work before assuming their present managerial responsibilities. They have an enduring respect for the work of everyone who interacts with clients. "Our agency lists five compelling reasons to do business with us," says Ditmar. "One of them is 'our investment in a quality staff.'"

"We think of our account managers as insurance professionals serving a role as important as that of the producer," adds Allen. "It's a different role, requiring a different skill set, but it is equally important to our agency's success." *

For more information

Universal Insurance Services (UIS)

Contact: Joan Ditmar, Commercial
Services Manager
Grand Rapids, Michigan
E-mail: jditmar@uis-inc.com

Rue Insurance
Contact: Elizabeth Allen, Executive Vice President, Client Services
E-mail: eallen@rueinsurance.com