Lessons from the Inside: What’s Working for Us

Shane and Tonya sit down with Retail Director Tara Graham to share real-world lessons from inside the Integra “lab.” From evolving service roles and managing change to improving customer experience and boosting team morale during a hard market, the conversation gets honest about what’s worked—and what hasn’t. Whether you’re running solo or managing a growing team, you’ll walk away with practical takeaways and tested ideas to strengthen your agency from the inside out. 

IA Forward to can help you take your agency from good to great. Learn more at iaforward.com, and follow IA Forward on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.

Transcript

Announcer: [00:00:00] This is IA Forward your Playbook for Success as an independent insurance agent. Here to help you knock it outta the ballpark are your host, Shane Tatum and Tonya Lied.  

Tonya: Welcome to IA Forward. We are so excited to welcome one of the most knowledgeable people about insurance that I have ever met our retail director, Tara Graham. 

Good morning. Glad to meet you. Well,  

Shane: don't, don't. You just love it when she intros like that. Welcome to my world with Tonya.  

Tonya: My world with Tonya. Hey, that might be the quote, Tonya. I've learned so much about this industry from her because she explains it better than Shane does.  

Shane: Amen. Absolutely. Tara's going to help you understand in layman's terms what we're talking about. 

Tonya: I do my best, Tara, running our retail operation. You have made a lot of adjustments recently and I would love for you to share with our listeners the way things were. The way they are now and some of your [00:01:00] thoughts  

Tara: behind those changes. Sure. It has been, like you said, changes is the key word here. We do have a lot of changes, but the idea or the hope is that when we do make changes, and Shane, help me to, uh, understand this. 

A lot. Not too long ago when we were thinking about this most recent change, change can get a bad rap when there's constant change or when there's things going on, but the reality of it is change is necessary when progress is happening. That did make me feel better about, yeah, some of these changes that were coming down because you don't wanna change just to change, but when the need presents itself and you can see a better way, the wrong choice is to not change. 

From our perspective, I'll just go into a little detail, Tonya, on where we were and now where we're headed and the why there. One of the things we noticed several years ago is there was a struggle with our personal lines, account managers on priority I. [00:02:00] What is it that they need to be doing in their day? 

What's most important or what's top of the stack? What can I put at the bottom of the stack? So we departmentalize what they were doing from new business, writing new accounts, quoting new customers, introducing them to the agency, and then servicing those accounts, working renewals, our folks back during that time. 

Were doing all of that together, and so you can see where there was this. Priority struggle. Okay. I've got a endorsement. I've got a vehicle that I need to add to a policy, but we have a new customer wanting us to quote their auto and home insurance. So, which one do we do? Thankfully, we were blessed and had the opportunity to divide that out. 

We were able to put a focus on new business with what we called sales executives at the time, and that was their primary focus. They worked on new business. Quoting new accounts and even existing customers needing to add new lines of business [00:03:00] to their products. So again, we were able to have that focus on new and that left our traditional account managers handling the service and the renewal of those accounts. 

We were thankful to be in a position to do that, and as time rocked along as we were able to introduce not too long ago, a service center. Designed to take off of the account managers, the quick transactional items that come along with servicing policies such as make it payments, endorsing policies, billing questions. 

In the future, there's gonna be certificates of insurance, but those things that are quick transactional, that when a representative is speaking with a client, they can take that request, get it processed, documented, and then it's done. And so. We were able to take all of those pieces of servicing accounts off of the account managers. 

It did present the opportunity that [00:04:00] because of our high flow of new business quotes coming in, we were able to see the need that we may need to either add some folks as sales executives to help with the new business flow that's coming in or combine. The functions, again, the new business with renewals because you have pieces of that account management that are now being pulled off. 

The account managers, are we in a spot now where you can have one person quoting new accounts and handling renewals? That is a more traditional setting and looking at other agencies or looking at peers. That is the setup for most, for a lot. On the personal line side, at least you have a person quoting new accounts and one handling the renewal. 

It allows them to gain ownership of that account. They know it from when they ride it, they know it when the, as the renewal process is going on. But the nice thing that we've been able to add from a growth standpoint is that service center. That is now taking a lot of those quick [00:05:00] transactional pieces out of that account management role to allow them to do this efficiently. 

So that is where we are today. We are exactly a week into going from two sales executives. I. Four account managers to now six account managers. The nice thing about that from Jamie Kirkland, she's our personal lines director. Up until this point, she was meeting with sales executives and account managers. 

Now she gets to meet with her personal lines team who are all doing like things. So that's a cleaner piece of, of that as well.  

Shane: The service center and that high volume transaction nature, those are one and done things, and that has been really good. We saw that capacity increase for our account managers. 

Tara saw that capacity increase along with Jamie within about 30 to 45 days of launching the service center, the high transaction stuff, whether that stuff goes to. [00:06:00] Self-service. Whether that stuff gets enhanced by ai, I don't know. Time will tell, but the reality is that clients still want some help when they need help. 

One of the things we've learned, maybe it's cultural, maybe it's geographic, east Texas, more rural, maybe less metro suburban areas. I don't know that matters. People don't like talking to a computer. I haven't ever talked to someone who says, wow, you really just had this great experience with my credit card company's AI based computer discussion. 

I love that. That's so fun. No, nobody ever says that. My 21-year-old yesterday said, I talked to a computer for 20 minutes yesterday trying to understand how to get whatever done. There's a Gen Z. For you, who doesn't want to do that? Staffing for that CSR customer service rep role within that service center has been a really big lift, and [00:07:00] that's the silver bullet of this discussion that popped up. 

Mm-hmm. We started having capacity issues on the sales side, and then it's okay, we're gonna have to redesign the flow of incoming new opportunities and prioritize some of that. And you go out there and do all this community relations work and marketing work, you generate referrals, opportunity, referral partnerships. 

You need to take care of those partnerships. Mm-hmm. Progress equals changes necessary. And I know that it was a funny conversation for me, it probably not for Tara, but for me, when Tara brought this to me a few weeks ago, even though we made fun of you, Shane, for years, for constantly taking us through this change cycle, uh. 

I think we need to change something. It was fun for me. It probably wasn't fun for Tara, but it was fun for me because it was like, aha. See, I'm not crazy, right? I'm not, I know y'all think I'd like to change, but growth and progress requires change. I think there's [00:08:00] things that are, listeners should understand our retail operations a little more on the mature side of the agency lifecycle, but at the same time, we really haven't grown. 

Up until about five years ago, we were a four or $5 million agency, probably four years ago, Tara, probably when you took over. Somewhere right in there. It's $50 million in premium agency now. It's tripled in size in the last four years. A lot of need, a lot of opportunity that requires us. To constantly evaluate processes and people and who's doing what and how do we make this flow better. 

Tonya: I would like to clarify for our listeners when we're talking about the service center, we are not talking about that there are 10 or 20 people in little cubicles in the back room with headsets on. We are not that size agency. Yeah. How many people are, are in our  

Tara: service center? Three. At present, we've got three. 

We have a director, Caitlyn Rankin, and then Michael Seaman and Sherry Hard. So if [00:09:00] there, there's a small  

Tonya: agency that's listening to this and they're like, need a service center because I find that term scary because to me the service center is. This idea of they're not in touch with my customers. How would this concept of a service center or a service team apply at a smaller three to four  

Tara: person agency? 

The idea here, again, in what they are fulfilling for us on the retail side are those quick transaction items. I need to make a payment or I need to add a vehicle. I need to add a driver and two. One or two person agency, those things, and you hate to call doing business and interruption, so I hate to use it in a negative light because that's what we do. 

We're servicing our clients to, to an agency that's not fully staffed. Having some assistance to help with those transactions is huge. It allows that agency to, when they have a customer in their [00:10:00] office, have that conversation uninterrupted, move forward with those quotes and continue to make that sale. 

While on the backside of things, they have a service center handling the payment from their existing client or sending out an ID card to a customer looking at purchasing a new vehicle. So they have these things automatically being handled for them on the backside of things and helping them progress in their agency. 

Shane: When you're starting out, and let's say you're a solopreneur. You're an agent, so you're doing it all right? You're selling, you're doing everything that our team was doing, say a few years ago, right before we split sales out of service. Our CSR slash account managers slash sales executives were basically operating like a solopreneur agent. 

And it was everything, and it worked for a while, just like it works for a while for a solopreneur. At some point you have a decision to make. If you are an agency owner and you [00:11:00] started the agency, you're successful because you're a good salesperson. If you're not successful, maybe you're not a great salesperson and you need to get a job, but most of the time the agency ownership is the rainmaker. 

They're the ones that started the book, built the book, and now they're overwhelmed. Now they're at this decision point. They have to decide. Mm-hmm. Maybe step one is a virtual assistant that they can send non-licensed required things to, for them to take a little bit of burden off, give them a little help. 

Let's call that phase one. Phase two becomes, okay, I need a licensed. Hire. I need someone that is licensed because I need to get some of these things off of me. Their service center is a single transactional based CSR, maybe that does the 5 8, 6, 6 7 8. Things that we've outlined mm-hmm. Do some of those things, but they're going to be more phone facing, more customer facing, [00:12:00] and they need to have a license. 

Don't skirt that with the Department of Insurance. Don't try to walk that very fuzzy line. If they're gonna be on the phone with clients, get a license. Mm-hmm. Make sure they're, they're in compliance. Make sure they're not gonna get you in trouble. And so. Now you've got this scene. Maybe you kept the video. 

There could be reasons why you would do both, and you're one and a half people in terms of cost, but you're two people doing a function and now you see your capacity as rainmaker salesperson to get back to what you love doing, and then it just keeps building from there. Do you then add a retention renewal person? 

To me, there's an evolution of an agency's life cycle that says you take these steps in phases as you grow. As you do that, you will start to feel how this works, how this doesn't work. We are just in iteration in our retail operation. If we were software, we would be [00:13:00] like version 5.67, right? Instead of version 1.0. 

There's a lot of agencies like that. Around the country. Some of them are three, four generations and they're on their version 8.6. This stuff happened over time. That's what I love about the independent agency system. It's never stagnant  

Tonya: from a customer perspective. I really do like this system because now I know specifically the system we've had for the last year or two years. 

I haven't known as a customer. Which person I'm supposed to be reaching out to. Now I know that I start with Amy. Amy is my person. Amy takes excellent care of me. That makes it more relationship based than policy based. And one of the things that we talk about on the podcast a lot is creating full-time clients. 

Tara, I would love to know how you coach your team to look at building those full-time relationships  

Tara: [00:14:00] and not just policy. I would love to say I spend a lot of time coaching, but I really don't. Our fault are, I'll be honest, they struggled from the relationship side of things and letting some of these things go in our previous model, so just. 

To give you an example, to help with aiding them in the priority of their day, the new lines of business. So let's say we wrote a customer's auto and they've called us now and they want us to look at their homeowner insurance. So the way the process for that before with that homeowner's quote for that customer. 

One account manager was assigned to would now go over to our sales team for them to quote that someone again, that they're not super familiar with. Not that they hadn't talked with them in the past, but not the person who truly handles their account. While they could see the need to do it that way, it wasn't ideal for them. 

They wanted to help that customer and do what they needed to do to get that additional line of business. Written, [00:15:00] so I hate to use the word Nate because I know it's not with everybody. Everybody does have to have some training along the way. Where we find ourselves today is where they're going to thrive. 

All of them, as we were talking about, combining these two pieces of an account management role together are super excited about it. It's back to, you know, ownership back to what they do best. Talking with the clients, whether that be with current. Ways of communication by email, phone, or text. They're able to build those individual relationships again with their clients, turn them over to other people. 

But from a coaching and training standpoint, one of the things we do have to stay on top of is customer expectation and response time. And we may have three or four that are doing something really well. We need to get all six onboarding and up to speed and doing things real similar.  

Shane: The problem that I. 

The IC in hindsight was that as a [00:16:00] practice, they were already doing this. So we were saying, Hey, our procedure, our policy is that we're gonna have sales separate from service and we're gonna do it that way. And it works great on paper. And when you have someone who absolutely does not like servicing, it turns out. 

We have people who are always gonna go the relationship route. It's just a natural place to go. Personal lines is not as much hunting as commercial lines. It's a different world and. Especially when you create referral partnerships and you reach a life cycle like us, where we get a lot of customer referrals and so we wanna take care of those people. 

The last thing you want to do when you're a client is be handed off. And our people know that because they don't like being handed off when they go to be serviced somewhere by some business. There's this reality that this is what they were practicing. Our sales executives were having a hard time [00:17:00] sending their. 

People they sold policies to, they felt like they were the full-time agent for that. They had a hard time handing that person over to an assigned account manager. And that's what you have to do. Look at it from the customer standpoint and back your way into it. How do you want your clients to see your agency? 

What works? Not just on paper, but what are your people going to naturally do? You can train on Coach 'em. I think Tara used the word innate. I think that's right. You really can't change some of that innate behavior that's gonna naturally happen. What Tara's done here, along with Jan, is they've embraced that innate behavior and said, okay, this is how our people can thrive. 

This is how our customers are gonna feel better. This is how we're gonna give a better customer experience. And here we go.  

Tara: There's not one member of our personal lines team that enjoys. Transferring their customers to a different department for [00:18:00] service. They wanted to stay with them and handle that.  

Shane: And matter of fact, the new challenge is getting them to fully embrace the transactional need of the service center because that's meant to increase their capacity and. 

Help them. Mm-hmm. So we're constantly working with how do we make that experience for the account manager? Mm-hmm. How do we help them embrace the service center fully so that it'll use its full capability to increase their capacity? We want you to have that time to slow down and talk to the client. If you give up these things, this short list of things that if you really hate doing. 

They drive you crazy, right? They're just process transactional things that are required. I know there's plenty of app builders and things going on in the industry that says your customers want self-service. Maybe, yes, to a degree. Want my banking app? To work when I open it to look at [00:19:00] transactions, but I look at my banking app a lot more than I look at my insurance app. 

I just don't have that much going on with my insurance policy Compared to some other self-servicing things do clients really want to have to redownload the app? Reset authentication. Figure out how to navigate, even if it's super intuitive. Or do they just want to text Amy, Vicky, Linda, or whoever their person is at the agency and say, Hey, bought a new vehicle, can you help me? 

What do clients really want is the question. That I think every agent has to start with, what do your clients want? What's the natural thing that your clients want?  

Tara: Tara, what do our clients want? Our clients want to speak. They want to speak with someone that's gonna help them with that need. Like Shane had said earlier, that could be geographical or just the nature of the history of the agency. 

Ours would prefer to [00:20:00] either email or call and speak with. Their person with the need that they have at that time.  

Tonya: Let's go to a different topic, Tara. The last 8,942 days of this hard market have been very difficult. How have you kept our team going? What have you done to celebrate wins? How are you keeping morale up? 

What have you done from a culture perspective that has helped them get through the last. Three  

Tara: decades of this, lots of prayer. This has been a very hard two and a half, three years for our folks. They have been stretched and tested, had to diffuse conversations, bring customers down off the ledge. They, I just can't speak any higher for our folks for weathering this storm. 

And while we're not. Completely out of it. There's a lot of the trickle effect. Thankfully it is getting better. You hate to say it's getting better for the whole, 'cause we, there's still customers that are experiencing some, whether [00:21:00] it's non-renewals rate increases continually, but for the most part it is getting better. 

We celebrate with our socials and our reviews. It's just any opportunity where we can bring to light the good that our people are doing. Highlight that, encourage that so that they can see that. Everybody sees it, that it's just not an email sitting in their inbox, but we wanna share that. I like to do good things for our folks and our team. 

I just think it goes a long way when people are recognized. Especially, we had a recent situation where we didn't keep an account, but it was recognized. By the customer who eventually moved away from our agency that our account manager, Amy, did a job and she did it very well. Even though they didn't stay with us, they wanted her to be recognized for the job that she did. 

Again, from Amy's perspective, it was. Not the best situation. She probably didn't wanna lose that account, but it was nice to hear the good that came out of [00:22:00] that. And that won't be the last from that client. There will be referrals. That person will probably send our way as a result of what Amy did. That client's gonna be back in a year? 

Yes.  

Tonya: And something that Tara does, but she didn't mention just then, is any time an email comes in where a client is bragging on a specific member of her team. She sends it out to the entire staff and our staff celebrates with her, and I love that you do that. Thanks.  

Shane: I'm not so sure you can have a better customer experience to receive accolades from a leaving client like that. 

I've really thought about that. For the last few weeks was this good? Just taking this objective 50,000 foot view of, of a scenario and say, okay, we lost this client, but the client went to another agency carrier, captive carrier in this case that we couldn't do anything about. And I. It was [00:23:00] price, right? In this market, in economy, there's some of that. 

There's a lot of that, right? It's not just, yeah, we're winning a lot of clients that are close or that are where we're still in the ballgame. Sometimes you've got a carrier or carriers that feel like they're a little too saturated in a geographic zip code, or they're doing some things that. You can tell they're trying to lower their risk within that zip code and you just can't do anything about it, like it is what it is. 

The thought of the fact that we have all this stuff going on, social media and all these different places talking about, it's all about customer experience. I agree with that. The question is though, what does that actually mean? What is the true definition of customer experience? The new one for me is, Hey, we've got. 

Bragging on an account manager from a client who is leaving our agency. At first, when you see it, it's what? That is weird. It's hard to get your head around, but the more I've thought about it, the [00:24:00] more amazing it actually is. We no longer have the customer, but they are raving fans. If you can create a raving fan from clients that become non-clients, that's customer experience. 

They were sad to leave. It felt bad. They didn't have a choice. It was. Several thousand dollars. They didn't have a choice. I get it, but. They were sad, they were heartbroken. It was almost like, we don't want to do this, but we have to do this. And it's just, it was amazing. It was absolutely amazing.  

Tonya: Yeah. I read it and I wanted to go smack the client just a little bit. 

Shane: Come on, man. Dip into your savings a little bit and pay the higher premium just to stay with us, right? No, maybe not.  

Tonya: Tara. I would love to see where you see the biggest opportunities within personal and growth over the next year.  

Tara: A lot of it is just continuing with talking about the customer experience and I think just people, they thrive with relationship and so just continuing to get our folk to that point [00:25:00] of good response times and getting back with people, what are those things that's gonna set us apart and make us personal in this industry? 

Making us personal, which is one of the core values, staying connected with those values. And allowing others to see that in, in that, that's who they're going to be doing business with. Building on these accolades like Amy just received and others, and not getting too impersonal. We talk about the apps, we talk about all of the different methods of communication, but getting to that point where truly listening to the clients and how they want to be communicated with. 

And then we do insurance, right? But we have  

Tonya: so much data at our fingertips. It's information overload, right? Yeah. What metrics matter the  

Tara: most to you on the data? What metrics matter the most? Yes. One of the things that we look at right now is retention. Are we keeping our clients? You can't help the [00:26:00] price in a lot of ways if you remove that component. 

Shane and I have been talking about that as well, so. Are we keeping the clients who we're bringing in? Are they going out the back door? Are we keeping them? That's a huge thing. But then also, what is their experience like with Integra? How do our folks feel when they're doing business with us? I think is a true test. 

Shane: We've been talking about increasing our survey environment in terms of just where we're doing some surveys. We do it on new business review request and talking about doing it more on other interactions, renewal cycle, potentially even moving into just, you don't wanna survey people to death, but a simple survey of how did I do? 

Rate me one to five stars. Just some feedback of did it go well? Is there something we're missing? I think those are really good things. I'm not a big survey guy if, unless you know, it's somebody that I've built a relationship with and then I open it up and the first thing that's gonna happen is I open up that [00:27:00] survey and if it's like 42 pages, I'm out, I'll. 

Pick on Outback Steakhouse. We went to the Outback the other night and I paid, and the wait staff there was good, and there was this young lady that was our waitress and she was good. You could just tell she was shy, and so there was a little bit of a shyness to her. When we have interactions like that, Julie and I are drawn to helping her for whatever reason. 

We just want to be nice to her and open up dialogue, so she was really good. I, so I just felt compelled to do the survey. So the little gadget on the table that I paid, and she set that up and then the survey popped up and I was like, yeah, I'll do it. So the survey came up. It was like, how was the ice in your tea? 

How was the, were the, and I, it's whoa. What are you doing? I abandoned the survey three screens in. I think I had 42. Literally, I'm not kidding. It was like 30 to 40 screens on this little kiosk and I'm like,  

Announcer: oh [00:28:00] gosh,  

Shane: this is dumb. Hey, if you're gonna do surveys, make sure, very simple couple of questions at most, right? 

Just keep it simple. Keep it to where they can. Boom. Done. Call it the ten second survey. I don't know. Yeah. It just reminds me of when I'm out, I'm paying attention to customer experience at other places. Mm-hmm. I know we need that feedback, but then you can go too far. I. And you can overwhelm the customer and you can get abandonment. 

Yeah.  

Tara: Tara, what are you reading right now? The book with that, our leadership team is Reading The Obstacle is The Way going through that one as we're having our meetings on that. And then I'm also picked up a book, my friend Hailey shared with me a couple of months back. It's Help for the Hungry Soul by Kristen Weather. 

It's a short read on growing your appetite for God's word. Good tips though, just on staying in the word.  

Shane: Tara, thanks for jumping in last minute on the podcast and being put in the hot seat [00:29:00] here. I'm always very appreciative of the work you do leading our retail team. Tara has to endure being the live lab. 

Of best practice attempts for Shane, she does it with grace and our teams have to constantly be reminded of that. I was telling somebody yesterday, you're a live lab, so I need you to embrace change. The service center concept will eventually go out. As an offering to our partner network, but guess who gets to be the Guinea pig? 

Our retail operation, and it is for the benefit of our retail operation, just like another partner in our network. At the same time, we introduced this live lab environment. To the service center and there's a lot of moving parts, right? We decided if we can get it right for the retail operation, we can get it right for any of our agents in the partner network as well. 

And Tara endures, lots of Shane, and she does it again with a lot of grace. So we appreciate that, Tara.  

Tara: Happy to do it. Tara, I'm gonna let you leave us [00:30:00] today with your favorite quote. One that comes to mind is by Nancy DeMoss wamu. She's a Christian teacher and author that I follow, and one of her quotes is, gratitude unleashes the freedom to live content in the moment rather than being anxious about the future or regretting the past. 

And that's from her book, choosing Gratitude, your Journey to Joy. So I like that quote from that book. Guys along with it. Yeah.  

Shane: Attitude's a choice. Make a great one.  

Announcer: Yep. Bye y'all. At the Integra Partner Network, we understand that carrier access is the key to your agency's success. That's why Integra offers direct access to top-rated personal and commercial carriers. 

Ensuring your agency thrives in today's challenging market. And with our comprehensive resources, profit sharing and bonus opportunities, technology and peer support, all while you retain a hundred percent of your book with no penalties to exit Integra, it's ready to empower you and your agency To find sustained growth, [00:31:00] find your way to Integra. 

Visit integra of partner network.com today. That's integra partner network.com.