Majdas Touch Insurance won the 2020 Agent for the Future Emerging Leader Award. Here, the agency’s founder shares her journey of launching a fully digital agency.
From the beginning of my career in insurance, my driving motivation has been to help as many people as possible. I want to help people have better experiences and change their perspectives on insurance.
To me, digital service is a fundamental way to create great customer experiences. My agency, Majdas Touch Insurance, is completely digital.
Before I started my agency, I spent 12 years as a captive insurance agent. The company I worked for had a lot of rules and restrictions about how I could use technology. They expected agents to use paper documents and meet with every client physically in the office.
This became untenable as I grew my book. I needed different methods to get in touch with all my new clients and prospects – if I had to see them physically in the office and process applications by hand, it severely limited my time.
Plus, as a millennial myself, I felt it didn’t make sense to use analog methods with the generations who were coming up. Millennials don’t want to drive across town to an office to sign a paper document. And if millennials have high expectations with digital, Gen Z will have even higher expectations.
I felt like there was a need for a shift in what’s considered the standard insurance office.
Making the leap
When I left the captive insurance world to go independent, I decided to do things my way and make everything digital. I didn’t want anybody to be limited from buying insurance or getting good service just because they couldn’t physically come into the office.
Being fully digital made things easier and smoother for me and also provided a better experience for my clients. Technology allows you to accommodate people’s needs in so many different ways beyond doing everything in-person.
Going digital also helped me scale my business. With the digital setup, everything is automated and streamlined. For the first few years, I was able to grow my client base and got to a point where I was managing 1,500 clients by myself. That would have been nearly impossible in my analog days.
When COVID-19 hit, I already had all the digital tools in place to serve clients. My agency ended up quadrupling in size and I had to hire three employees to handle all the new business.
Advice to grow
What allowed my agency to grow during such a challenging time? The new Agent for the Future research report shows that I’m not alone – agencies that adopt more digital tools grow faster than those with fewer tools.
But, along with adopting digital capabilities, there are two pieces of advice I would give agents who want to be prepared for the future.
1. Be available and be responsive
The most common thing I heard from new clients was that they were switching because they couldn’t ever get a hold of their agent. When their agent wasn’t in the office, they didn’t know how to get a hold of them.
In the digital world, that shouldn’t be the case. It’s important for agents to be available – whether through a voice over IP phone system, texting, email, social media or however else. Agents should make sure clients know how to get in touch with them and that messages are answered in a timely manner.
2. Go paperless
The fact that we don’t use any physical documents was a huge advantage during COVID-19. Clients didn’t have to come into our office. They didn’t have to send anything through the mail. They could do everything easily from their home computer.
My advice to other agents would be to stop printing papers. Stop using physical documents and sending things through the mail. Switch to an online platform for all filing and transactions. This will save you a lot of money, save the environment, and also save time that you can use to sell more.
I think it’s crucial to make that full shift versus being in no-man’s land in-between analog and digital.
A simple toolbox
The tools we use in my agency are fairly simple. I’d recommend starting with some digital fundamentals:
- Electronic signature – Most carriers offer electronic signature tools, but sometimes you have one-off documents you need signed. An electronic signature platform has saved me a lot of time. We literally do everything through it. We don’t have a single document sent through the physical mail.
- Texting – We use a customer relationships management (CRM) system that has texting built into it. We rarely get phone calls, but we are constantly texting with clients. This frees up a lot of time.
- Automated follow-ups – Our CRM lets us set up automated follow up emails and reminders for things like late payments, documents, reviews and more.
Due to our success with our process and digital tools, we have had the great pleasure of training Agency Owners on our workflow, processes, and specific tools implemented to help anyone succeed at being digital. I am excited to share that Insurance School by Majdas Touch will be offering digital agency courses online. Pre-registration is open on our agency website for anyone interested in getting more information.
Owning a digital agency has been the best decision I have made as an agency owner. This came from my desire to bring my clients expertise, convenience and transparency. It took a while to transition my existing clients to new ways of doing business, but now we onboard every client into our digital systems, and they appreciate how simple it is to do business with us.
Far from taking away from relationships with clients, digital actually deepens client relationships, because they feel like you are going the extra mile to make things easier for them.
Read the new Agent for the Future report, Rise of the Digital Insurance Agency, to learn more about how digital capabilities help agencies grow.
Every agency appointed with Liberty Mutual and/or Safeco Insurance is responsible for ensuring that they are in compliance with all state and federal laws/regulations that govern their business, including, but not limited to, telemarketing, texting and commercial emails. If you have questions, please seek advice from your legal counsel.
