Is Anybody Listening? What Agents Say About Carrier Relationships

February 12, 2015

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.Executive Summary Carrier-agency relationships matter more than technology to agents, according to a survey conducted by Deep Customer Connections and Wells Media’s Insurance Journal for Carrier Management. This article highlights some of the write-in comments from agents who were asked to score the helpfulness of carrier technology and relationships in four aspects of their day-to-day activities. For a full report on the DCC/IJ survey findings, see related articles:

Executive Summary

Carrier-agency relationships matter more than technology to agents, according to a survey conducted by Deep Customer Connections and Wells Media's Insurance Journal for Carrier Management. This article highlights some of the write-in comments from agents who were asked to score the helpfulness of carrier technology and relationships in four aspects of their day-to-day activities. For a full report on the DCC/IJ survey findings, see related articles:
Should Carriers Invest More in Technology to Boost Agency Ties? Help Us Find More Business, Agents Tell Carriers

“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.)