Page 161 - The UnCaptive Agent

134 THE UNCAPTIVE AGENT

offered by the service center that you use. Most service
center operations are very good at referring clients back
to you for the things that they cannot provide. Each
service center you deal with will have a different set of
operating procedures for how they interact with your
clients and employees. It’s important that you fully
understand those processes and train your employees
on those differences.
A couple of final points about the client service
agent: in order to sell insurance, they must also to be
licensed to do so. Some states have special licensing for
client service representatives, which is a limited insur-
ance license. Without the full privileges of a producer
license, CSRs cannot legally sell anything, including an
additional premium endorsement. Since all people in
your agency should be focused on selling this, limited
CSR license is not an acceptable type of licensure for
your client service representatives. You should ensure
that they get a producer’s license.

Hire Experience or Train Your Own?

Service employees are among the most difficult to find
in our industry. There has been a shortage of quality
client service representatives for at least a quarter of a
century. That means you should be looking for a new
employee long before you need one. You should be
prepared to hire a client service representative fairly
early in the development of your business.
Many agency owners prefer to hire and train their
people, rather than hiring someone with experience
from another agency. The advantage to doing this is
you get an employee with no bad habits (theoretically!),
and you’re able to train them exactly the way you like.
The obvious disadvantage is this takes a long time. In