Page 162 - The UnCaptive Agent

THREE ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONSOF YOUR AGENCY AND HOW TO STAFF THEM 135

my experience, you can have a personal insurance CSR
able to competently quote new business within ninety
days and perform limited service functions within about
the same period with your active help. With your active
help, that may be all you need the first year or two of
your existence. If you need a fully trained personal lines
CSR, that will take two years. You can help speed that
process up by ensuring that they get lots of training.
Excellent training courses are available from almost all
insurance companies today. The Certified Insurance
Service Representative (CISR) program, operated by the
National Academy, will help bring your new employee
up to speed quickly.
Commercial insurance client service representatives,
on the other hand, take as long as five years to be fully
trained. Like their PL colleagues, they may be able to
perform limited functions like small business quoting
fairly quickly. Still, mastery of a complex role will take
even the brightest several years, with excellent training
and mentoring. If you are building an agency to focus
on commercial insurance, it will probably be worth the
expense and the time required to recruit an existing
CSR from the beginning of your business.

Don’t Forget to Offer Self Service Options

Almost every consumer now serves themselves. When
you shop at the grocery store, buy gasoline, make
deposits of checks with your bank, and buy almost any-
thing online, chances are that you are serving yourself.
Businesses, led by huge online retailers, have changed
the way people prefer to buy things, not just how they
are sold. Statistics now show that insurance consumers
are enrolling in insurance company self-serve options,
including service centers, websites, and apps, fifty