Is your insurance business soaring? Whether you’re a fledgling business or you’ve been around for a long time, it’s helpful to occasionally step back and take a look at your insurance business from above. How is your business doing at a larger-scale, structural level?
Do You Have Strong Hiring Practices?
Ultimately, the success of your company rests on the smaller successes of the people you hire. According to Forbes , “the best way to ensure strategy implementation is to hire the right people into the company.” Take a bird’s eye view of your hiring practices.
- Do you understand your company’s mission and culture well enough to invite the right people into your business?
- Are you hiring for values and fit in addition to experience?
- How do you identify gaps in your company or needs that could be filled through training?
How Do You Respond to Customer Needs?
Another large-scale view you should seek out is the way that you interact with others. In addition to the people you hire, the other people who really matter at your insurance agency are the customers. As you take a step back and examine how your business runs, ask the following questions:
- What are your feedback processes?
- Are you creating online content that’s responsive to customer needs?
- How do you choose or develop new products or processes?
A company that knows who it is but is responsive to customers’ needs is a company that’s setting itself up for success.
Does Your Structure Allow for Innovation?
When you look at your organization from the outside, do you see an organization that’s static or changing with the times? Innovation can lead to additional work, and if you have a core insurance business, it can seem unnecessary. Why change when your business is running relatively smoothly?
While you don’t need to change your plans and products all of the time, insurance agencies are like any other company: you must shift with the times. According to Business News Daily , “one of the keys to any successful business is being able to come up with new ideas to keep operations, products and services fresh.”
- Do you give employees time to innovate?
- What do you do with new ideas as they arise? Is there funding and time to pursue these ideas?
- How do you evaluate new ideas to determine whether you will pursue them?
- How do you evaluate the success of the implementation of new ideas?
Are You Ready for a Disaster?
It’s surprising how many insurance businesses don’t have adequate insurance coverage of their own. It’s not that you’ve forgotten to insure yourself against water damage. However, you may have inadequate insurance against human-made disasters. That’s where E&O insurance comes in. E&O insurance protects you from problems caused when a person makes an error or omission. If your customer sues you because you forgot to properly update their policy and they suffered financial harm, are you prepared?
At American Agents Alliance, we are here to help your insurance business succeed. We work with many independent insurance agencies across the country, and we’d be delighted to work with you. Check out our E&O insurance products and contact us today.
