How To Prioritize Your Insurance Day
Kelly Donahue-Piro
President: Agency Performance Partners
Co-Founder: Agency Appeal

 

Do you feel like a hamster on a wheel, or like you may actually get strangled by your to do list? There are mounting to do’s in insurance and generally speaking we can all feel overwhelmed by the volume of work at almost every job in an agency. So how do you manage it and maintain it while feeling good every day? Our solutions will help you if you let them. Let’s walk through how to get better control of your insurance day.

A Great Day Starts the Day Before

If you want to kill your day, you need to leave every workday with a review and a plan for your next day. Knowing clearly what your most important tasks are and getting a bit organized around them helps you come in and hit the ground running. Also let’s be honest, on most days there is still a bit of spillover from work we were not able to accomplish. When we know clearly what it is, we can walk in tomorrow and hit the ground running vs walk in and the phone starts ringing and we still don’t know what to tackle first.

 

Your Best Day Starts With You

This section may sound like your mother. You have to get a great nights sleep, eat breakfast, work out, take your vitamins and leave to get to work with plenty of time. When you come to work a little under the weather, are you at your best? No way. Your best work day comes when you take care of yourself. There is no way you are at your best when you are rushing into work late and flustered.   You aren’t starting out ready to rock.  Instead get into work early, get your coffee and be ready to start your day when the agency starts.

 

What You Do First Matters

I don’t want you to get stuck in your email first. Resist the urge to open your email and instead dive right into one of your big projects. Just getting one big rock out of the way starts your day off on the right foot. Then you feel accomplished and ready to keep moving. When you get sucked into email you start your day off without accomplishing anything.

 

Limit Your Email

No one expects you to respond to email in 30 seconds. That’s a behavior that you trained yourself to do. Why not instead limit your email to a few times a day. When you live in the ping pong game of email you aren’t getting as much of the work done.

 

First Call Resolution

Think about how you can be efficient by taking care of the items that need to be tended to on the phone. If someone needs a change, do it on the phone and this includes leaving notes. We often drag things out too long and this causes more backlog.

 

Break things into High, Medium and Low Priority.

Most management systems and CRM tools have High Medium and Low priority. A common trap we see people fall into is everything is a 911. Very few things in insurance are a 911, lapsed coverage, major claims, certificates for contractors on job sites or someone at a dealership are the only ones I know. Those would be high need to deal with ASAP. If it needs to be completed within 24 hours it’s a medium priority. Anything 24+ hours should be a low priority.

 

Take Breaks

We recently worked with an agency where the account managers said they wouldn’t go to the bathroom – they rarely left their desks. I checked and there were no shackles. This was self imposed and unhealthy. It’s ok to walk around, use bathrooms and take breaks. We recommend it.

 

Make Your Plan

If you need a plan every morning you have to start with a plan at night! Before you leave make your plan of attack.

 

The bottom line is you need a strategy every day and you need to remain diligently organized. You can’t come in and drink from a fire hose. Work to take control of as much as you can!