What is the key to success as an insurance agency? It’s not necessarily your rollout of many new products. Your success is found in the quality of your work and the resulting high-quality relationships with your insurance clients. When you focus on the details of your insurance products and your client relationships, you are better able to reach your big picture goals as well. These routines will help you improve the quality of your work.
Focus on Quality
Making quality of work a stated priority will help your employees maintain focus on the details that allow your insurance agency to excel. According to Inc, “unless a business views quality as its single, non-negotiable goal, workers will inevitably feel the need to make tradeoffs and quality will slip.” Your employees need to know that you view high-quality service as something that is more important than speed or bringing in masses of new clients.
Define and Understand Mistakes
To get better workplace processes, you need to understand where mistakes are made. Create tracking procedures for your workplace errors and have regular check-ins with staff to see how those mistakes got made and consider how to avoid them in the future. Audit work so that you can discover sources of errors that even your employees may not recognize.
Address Errors
What do you do when you find an error? The Learning and Development Professional suggesting choosing “one concrete action at a time to make error-free.” This process could involve creating a checklist for employees’ work and ensuring that they follow the checklist or examining software products that you use and determining where people are confused as they work with these products.
Pinpoint a Need for Training
Do employee errors come from speed or do they come from something else, such as a lack of understanding of a product? Understanding your errors can show you where you need to train your employees to improve consistency and reduce errors.
Create a Culture of Improvement
Instead of shaming employees who make mistakes, create a culture that celebrates finding and addressing errors. You could institute quality circles – regular discussions of challenges and the ways to manage those. Treat an error-free workplace as a goal toward which you’re constantly striving, and celebrate each step of the way. This will make your employees feel more positive about the changes that they need to make.
E&O Insurance Is the Back Up for Your Company
No matter what procedures you have in place, errors do occur, and you need to be ready. Does your insurance agency have E&O insurance? If not, you could be at financial risk if you make a mistake that impacts a client. A client could sue your agency for a small mistake that has big consequences for that individual’s wellbeing; for example, a mistake could lead to inadequate insurance coverage. E&O insurance is there to protect you just in case such an error occurs.
At American Agents Alliance, we work to be the support that you need to run a successful independent insurance agency. From marketing tools to E&O insurance, we give you what you need to be a strong business with a long-term future. Contact us today to learn more about the many benefits of becoming an American Agents Alliance member.
