Technology Part 2

I had my reminder to produce this article sent to my beeper(pager) for you 1980s techno wizards. Technology to me is the game apps on my iPhone and used to be the spider solitaire on my home computer. Hopefully, we are all utilizing social media by now, and if you are not, shame on you. You better have Gram, Chat, Meta and Twitter agency accounts (Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and Twitter). Technology is more than those things, though. Technology is how you navigate through all the aspects of running your agency. From accounting, marketing, quoting, claims handling, and chatting to engage your customers or potential customers.

First, you need to determine how valuable your time is, $1 or $500 per hour. This should be assessed when deciding whether or not to pay to have something done or to do it yourself. Many of us just look at cost and not the cost of having you do a vital task, but you could better serve yourself, the agency, and your clients by doing another job that cannot be outsourced (meeting with clients, reviewing coverages, etc…). This hard market makes us look at costs with much more scrutiny to see where we can save money. If those money savings are at the expense of technology or do not employ technology to its fullest extent, you are doing your agency an extreme disservice. Technology will make the customer experience seamless, effortless and project that their agent is on top of things, giving them greater peace of mind. Isn’t that what we are all striving to achieve? Happy/content customers are less likely to shop. You tell your clients not to focus on price but to focus on whether or not they are appropriately insured. I would take some of your own advice. Do not focus on the technology’s price but on whether it provides your agency enough value to justify the price. Is your peace of mind worth it as well?

You better be using social media as it is free marketing (unless you pay for a boost). Even if there is a charge, it is typically negligible. Social media allows you to reach customers like never before. You can utilize social media schedulers (like Rachel) or create the content and posts yourself. If you rely on yourself or someone at your agency to create and post content from scratch, things can get missed. A solid scheduler or schedule ensures that you engage consumers and potential clients regularly. I have seen studies on marketing that indicate the first time someone sees something, they may not see it or ignore it as we are overloaded with social media posts and information. The second and third time we see something, we may now see it or take notice, but it probably will not drive us to action. The fourth through eighth time will annoy us, and we want it to go away. But then something happens, and when we see it a ninth time, we may take action. Who knows why? Maybe we just want it off our feed, we like their persistence, or we figure it must be important. (One of life’s mysteries.) I have also seen that creating different posts increases traffic rather than blasting the same post over all the platforms. I would imagine that this is due to customers thinking, “Hey, this took some time to do, and I want an agency that is thorough and pays attention to details, that is willing to put in the work. (Just my thoughts). In my opinion, agencies that don’t post or engage in social media or do so infrequently are at a distinct disadvantage. Agencies that blast the same posts over all platforms regularly are almost there, and agencies that regularly post on all platforms and vary their content will see the most success. I will provide the following analogy. If you hit .250 with 54 rbi and 11 home runs, you could be a major league baseball player (infrequently posting on social media). If you hit .300 with 100 rbi and 35 home runs, you may be an all-star in the major leagues (blasting posts over all social media platforms on a regular basis). Lastly, if you average .350 with 180 rbi and 40 home runs for your career, you would be a hall of famer (regularly posting to all platforms, varying your content for the different platforms). So, you need to decide, do you want to be a major leaguer, all-star, or hall of famer? Get in the game, though, as you don’t want to languish in the minor leagues.

The biggest thing with technology is solving how to engage potential customers and how quickly this engagement can occur. We all want immediate satisfaction, gratification, and engagement (when I want to engage). Technology can help with that engagement by your agency utilizing email, texting, live people to talk to, and chatbots. Who knows how many opportunities you are missing out on throughout the year that your competitors are not missing. Only the shadow knows. (I just aged myself with an old, old, old-time radio show reference.) Think about yourself as a consumer. If you go to call or email someone, how long do you wait before moving on to their competitor? Some of you may wait one or two days, while others may wait three minutes (my daughter). Don’t we all just want to be wanted? Your response time tells the customer how important they are to you and how much you want their business. Technology allows you to shorten or speed up your response time. My daughter throws an absolute fit if I don’t respond to a text within seven seconds but fails to return my texts for hours. Realize that the only thing you can control is your response time, and if you manage that, well, the customer (my daughter) will be happy.

We have just touched the surface of technology, and you need to thoroughly research and vet which parts work best with your agency. This is why we created our technology committee - to help you navigate this tech-driven world. Each agency will have to develop their perfect fit as this is not a one size fits all. Do you want the be the abacus (ancient Babylonian technology), the Commodore 64 with a floppy disc (1980s called and wants their computer back), or the latest Mac Book Pro (the Cadillac)? If you can afford the Cadillac, I recommend purchasing the Cadillac. All will work to some extent, but the last one will allow you to shine, and don’t we all want to shine as the shiny objects get the most attention?

As always, this is just Brett’s 5 Sense (hopefully we get inflation under control and a can return to 2) and I hope it was helpful. You can contact me through my MySpace account and if it is urgent, do not hesitate to page/beep me. If you need any clarification or have any suggestions for future articles, please email me at bgerger@iiaofil.org.