“What gets licensed people buried isn’t hard work. It’s the wrong work.”
Go read the one-star reviews for almost any insurance agency. Not the fraud complaints. The ordinary ones. “Nobody called me back.” “I left three messages.” “Been a client nine years and I can’t get anyone on the phone.”
Here’s what I think happened. The client’s clock is set to Amazon now. They order something at midnight and it’s on the porch by noon, so when they email their agent about a coverage question, if you don’t respond right away it feels like a week. The expectation isn’t reasonable. It also isn’t going away. That’s just the bar now, and every agency is getting measured against it whether we agreed to the measurement or not.
So, the whole team spends the day sprinting to clear the minimum. Return the call. Process the change. Answer the email before it becomes a bad review. And on a good day you hit it. You keep up.
But keeping up was never the job. Nobody got into this work to be a really fast processing machine. We signed up to actually help people. To catch the coverage gap before the claim, to know the client well enough to see the thing they didn’t know to ask about. That’s the part that makes this a profession instead of a transaction. And it’s the first thing that disappears when the team is buried, because going above and beyond takes time the minimum already ate.
I think the way out starts with a question. How much of what’s burying my licensed staff actually requires a license? A huge share of the daily load, the data entry, the document chasing, the form prep, the back-office admin work, does not need a licensed person. But it lands on them anyway, and it crowds out the work that does.
Separate those two things and the whole picture changes. The non-licensed work goes to people who can handle it well. The licensed staff get their capacity back. And capacity is the whole game, because capacity is what lets someone actually return the call, sit in the conversation, and build a relationship instead of closing a ticket and moving to the next fire.
That’s what we’ve been doing at Virtual Intelligence. Hiring and training virtual employees who take the non-licensed work off an agency’s plate so the licensed team has room to do the part they signed up for.
The agencies that win the next ten years won’t be the ones whose people care the most. Everybody cares. They’ll be the ones who built a structure so the caring turns into something that the client can actually feel.
Ready to give your licensed team their time back? Schedule a demo with Virtual Intelligence and see how a virtual employee can take the non-licensed work off your plate so your agents can focus on what they actually signed up for.