Nort Salz, CEO of Deep Customer Connections, has been surveying agents on behalf of individual P/C insurance carrier clients for years. Recently, as he tallied up responses from a broader survey—of nearly 500 agents who are readers of Insurance Journal—he expressed some frustration with the findings.

“Do carriers not really hear and understand?” he asked rhetorically as he reviewed 311 write-in comments to a survey seeking agents’ views of their relationships with carrier personnel and 307 comments about the usefulness of carrier technology.

“The comments—both about relationship and technology—could have come from any of our surveys. It appears that agents have the same messages for carriers regardless of what is asked,” he said.

“Are the messages not clear to carriers? Is there something that blocks them from ‘getting it?’ Are there competing needs and issues that deafen them to agents’ messages?”

(Editor’s Note: This article focuses on the comment section of a survey conducted by DCC on behalf of Carrier Management. For full survey results, click on the links to related articles in the Executive Summary above.)

Salz summed up the agents’ concerns about carrier relationships with three underlying themes: ineffective direct contact, lack of alignment and competency issues (lack of people skills and sales skills).

A full 174 comments expressed a desire for better direct contact between carrier and agent, with commenters complaining about slow response times from carriers—or no response at all. “Hard to establish close working relationships since too many individuals hide behind email,” one agent said in a representative comment in this category. “Voicemail, voicemail, voicemail, with many times calls not returned,” another said, reporting that same situation with emails.

“Underwriters at the company level play musical chairs,” the agent continued, speaking to another recurring subtheme about high turnover rates at carrier offices.

Addressing a perceived lack of alignment between carriers and agents, Salz offered two representative comments from a group of 98. “Many [carriers] feel they’re not on the same side as the agent. This is a combined effort, and we both represent the company,” one said. Another said, “They are more interested in developing technology to bypass the agent.”

The harsher tone of the latter comment was more common with this group of survey responses compared with other surveys Salz has worked on. Particularly jarring were comments such as, “Carriers will tell you there is a relationship. There just isn’t,” a paraphrase Salz said reflects a sizable group of responses to the DCC/IJ survey.

Salz recognizes that the phrasing of the question—”What is most problematic about relationships with carrier personnel these days?”—invited critical responses. But the negativity was “more than the occasional whining” that comes through in other surveys he’s performed. Overall, there were just nine positive comments among the 300-plus answers to the relationship question.

The tone also may have something to do with the fact that agents in the DCC survey were asked to focus on relationships and technology together. “Carriers are trying to replace agents with technology,” one agent said responding to an open-ended question about problems with technology.

Like the relationship questions, the technology questions also revealed a few underlying themes—the most common of which had to do with carrier systems being overly complicated and varying considerably from one carrier to the next.

More than half the comments cited complexity, while more than 100 comments suggested that carrier technology is out of date. “There was even a comment that said, ‘I think these people are still using DOS,'” Salz reported.

A smaller group of agents (58) answering the question about technology problems expounded on relationship issues, expressing the idea that carriers design their technology without understanding the agents’ perspective. In spite of their smaller number, these stood out from the list—some because of their length, and others because of the big bold capital letters in which they were written.

“Not very intuitive. Many systems seem to be designed and developed by people who either don’t understand the mindset of their end use or don’t care to understand the mindset of the end user,” began one 175-word comment.

“TECHNOLOGY SUFFERS FROM ONE MAJOR FLAW. MOST OF THE PEOPLE WRITING THE SOFTWARE NEVER WROTE A POLICY,” another said.

“THEY DID NOT CONSULT ANYONE who would actually use their software. I don’t know what they spent, but the people in my agency avoid them due to software issues,” wrote a third.

Salz said there is a message here from agents: “One of the main themes is when you design it, don’t put your smart IT people in a room. Come out and talk to us.”

Other commenters wrote about carrier technology shifting work and costs onto the agent, which some viewed as a positive—enabling the agent to have more control of the work, Salz said. But for the most part, the 16 commenters in this group echoed that “they [carriers] expect you to use it so they don’t have to, i.e., reduce their own costs.”

There were also some miscellaneous comments about technology creating other issues for agents, including cyber liability, according to Salz.