For as long as insurers have distributed products through agents, a difficult question has dogged the industry: Who owns the customer?

It’s not an academic query. The answer has important strategic and tactical implications for all involved—from defining how (and with whom) customer data is shared to clarifying who’s ultimately responsible for account management, cross-marketing and the long-term health of the customer relationship. It’s a controversial question and one that often inspires vigorous debate among industry insiders. It also happens to be the wrong question.

We live in the age of the empowered consumer. People have a wealth of information available at their fingertips—easy access to product information, pricing, and even crowdsourced reviews of carriers and agents. Gone are many of the traditional obstacles that made it time-consuming and difficult for consumers to explore, evaluate, purchase and manage insurance coverage.

As is the case in many industries today, the insurance consumer is in the driver’s seat. And, in an environment like that, no one owns the customer. Not the agent. Not the carrier. To suggest otherwise would be an arrogant view that is inconsistent with the realities of today’s marketplace. If anybody “owns” the customer, it’s the customers themselves.

The real question insurance providers should be asking is not “who owns the customer?”—it’s “who owns the customer experience?” That’s because, while the empowered insurance consumer prefers to control their own destiny, their choices and behaviors will necessarily be influenced by the experiences they encounter. From conducting product research online to soliciting advice from an agent to applying for coverage and beyond—it’s the ownership and design of these customer experience “episodes” that matter. While carriers and agents don’t own customers, they most certainly own the impression that’s left on them through these episodes.

The challenge, however, is that neither party is singularly accountable for the entire customer experience. Ownership is often shared, since many episodes in the insurance customer experience cut across the agent and carrier domains. That often creates dysfunction, as the two groups squabble over what should be improved about the experience, how and by whom.

Some carriers skirt the issue by focusing on what they do control—customer touchpoints such as online quoting, billing or centralized 800-line service. That strategy has limitations, though, because consumers can’t easily compartmentalize the insurance customer experience. They don’t always know where the lines are drawn between carrier and agent, where the handoffs occur between the two parties. And so, when the customer experience disappoints, neither the carrier’s nor the agent’s brand emerges unscathed.

Furthermore, while it might be expeditious for carriers to focus on the parts of the customer experience they clearly own, those parts might not be the most important ones to the customer nor the areas where the greatest opportunity for competitive differentiation exists.

For all these reasons, it’s neither practical nor prudent for carriers to ignore elements of the customer experience that are owned (or, to put it in less controversial terms, “administered”) by their agents.

But how can a carrier, particularly one that relies on independent distribution, insert itself into aspects of the customer experience that are clearly overseen by the agent? How can the carrier propagate customer experience best practices beyond its own offices and into those of its agents, where brand perceptions are so often forged?

It’s a thorny proposition, as many agents—independents and even some captives—view themselves as entrepreneurs, as business owners who have the authority to run their business as they see fit. Overcoming that sentiment requires some diplomacy. If agents sense that the carrier is encroaching on their territory, dictating the “right” way to do business, then friction will ensue and the insurer’s customer experience improvements will be relegated to the home office. That would be a poor outcome for the carrier, the agent and their shared customers.

So, if you’re an insurer looking to engage your field force in a constructive effort to competitively differentiate the customer experience, consider these five tips:

1. Acknowledge shared ownership.

Disarm territorial sensitivities by readily acknowledging that the insurer doesn’t own the whole customer experience. Neither the carrier nor the agent can claim such ownership, because they each play an instrumental role in shaping customer impressions.

Such an admission by carrier executives sends an important signal to agents, opening the door to a more collaborative approach for shaping the pre- to post-sale experience.

2. Make the case for action.

One way to facilitate carrier and agent collaboration around customer experience improvement is to demonstrate the risk of dysfunction, the impact of delivering a subpar experience. This can help bring urgency to the task and drive the parties to find common ground.

The data to make this argument is readily available. Watermark Consulting’s Insurance Customer Experience ROI Study found that insurance providers that lag in customer experience quality tend to underperform those that lead by over a 3-to-1 margin in shareholder return. The key takeaway: Carriers and agents that don’t work together to deliver a great customer experience may be putting their entire franchise at risk.

3. Educate and equip.

Carriers can’t expect to dictate the design of every customer interaction in which an agent is involved. They can, however, equip agents with the knowledge and skills required to cultivate customer experience excellence in their own offices.

From mapping out the customer journey to diagnosing its highs and lows to applying best-practice principles of customer experience design—these are capabilities that carriers too often keep close to their vests (whether they have that expertise in-house or solicit outside help to build it). However, there’s much to be gained when carriers share those techniques with their affiliated agents and essentially embed those competencies into the field offices. In that scenario, the carrier’s agents aren’t just being trained in how to deliver the customer experience, they’re being trained in how to design it for success.

4. Open the feedback spigot.

Soliciting and acting on customer feedback is a cornerstone of any successful customer experience strategy. While carriers typically possess more sophisticated, enterprise-grade feedback management tools, agents generally have more regular, direct contact with customers. That means both parties have valuable insight-gathering tools at their disposal, and the key is to leverage them all.

Carriers shouldn’t discount agents’ insights about the customer, even if they’re based on anecdotal evidence. However, carriers should help agents supplement those anecdotal insights with quantitative ones—for example, by leveraging enterprise feedback tools for the field’s benefit, or at least offering tutorials on how agents can build “do-it-yourself” voice-of-the-customer survey programs. In this way, carriers can help ensure that they and their agents are collectively gathering the data needed to accurately gauge (and then improve) the quality of the customer experience.

5. Co-create the experience.

For some parts of the insurance customer experience, agent and carrier interactions are so intertwined that it makes sense to tackle them with a united front (application and underwriting being a classic example). This is perhaps the highest step on the customer experience maturity curve, where manufacturer and distributor work together to shape an experience that’s impressive and seamless.

Presuming all parties have been educated in the same customer experience design techniques, it can be valuable to bring field and home office representatives together to critically evaluate a particular piece of the policyholder journey and then develop a future-state blueprint. By incorporating agent and carrier perspectives up front, this type of joint experience design effort yields better outcomes for all involved.

In today’s social media-connected, information-rich marketplace, customers are more empowered than ever. Nobody truly “owns” them.

But ownership of the customer experience is a different matter altogether. Great companies do take ownership of that by very deliberately and intentionally managing the many touchpoints that shape customer perceptions.

For insurance companies that sell through intermediaries, the path to a differentiated customer experience necessarily crosses through their agents’ offices, hence the importance of involving and influencing that constituency. By deftly engaging agents in the customer experience improvement effort, insurers can make progress on two important fronts: creating a more positive impression not just on their policyholders but also on their producers.