To paraphrase the late, great Rodney Dangerfield, independent insurance agents don’t get no respect.

It’s bad enough that a recent career survey ranked your profession below janitors, bookbinders and even editors (see my related blog, ”At least you’re not a roustaboust“). Now, the latest Forrester Research consumer survey reveals that your customers don’t even find you fun.

The survey, conducted over the Internet last October, gave independent agents an overall score of “okay” from 4,600 consumers who had interacted with a variety of companies. Forrester asked consumers to rate insurance companies on three areas: “meets needs,” “easy to work with” and “enjoyable.” Several insurers, including USAA, Liberty Mutual, Progressive and The Hartford, were ranked “good” by respondents. But when it came to being “enjoyable,” consumers rated independent agents “poor,” while giving them “good” ratings for “meets needs” and “easy to work with.”

What does this mean? Evidently it’s not an ease-of-use issue; respondents ranked agents “good” on meeting customer needs and being easy to work with. And it’s not just a carrier issue, either. Savvy carriers know, and slower carriers are discovering, that it’s not enough to simply provide ease of use through technology and real-time services — in fact, that’s just the starting point (see this related article on Deep Customer Connections’ recent survey on agents telling carriers they need more ease of use).  

From just looking at the numbers, the problem seems to be with the agency system itself, as several carriers got high marks from consumers as being enjoyable to work with. Granted, the results may be skewed because of the focus on personal lines insurance purchasers, but this dissing of insurance agents shouldn’t be the case. It all boils down to the perception of insurance agent as unnecessary middleman, useful perhaps, but more likely just another roadblock between the customer and the underwriter.

The irony is, agents are in a much better position to deliver real customer satisfaction — and yes, even “fun” – than any insurer ever could. In our monthly agency success stories, we speak with agency owners, especially those in small towns or rural areas, who don’t think twice about emergency customer visits, of knowing the names and ages of teenaged drivers about to be added to a family’s auto policy, of engaging customers in intimate conversations to discover their plans for the future and how insurance coverage can help protect those plans. These agencies and their employees are also connecting to their communities through charitable work, recruitment at area schools, and other ways to create engagement with customers and prospects. It’s a testament to the level of service that every independent agent should be providing to valued customers, especially at a time when every customer counts.

And inevitably in today’s world, part of that customer outreach is through intelligently developed and executed social media planning. Maybe that’s where the smart carriers have an edge on agencies — they have the financial wherewithal and staffing to plunge right in. (Luckily, you don’t need these resources to make good use of this new tool: check out ACT’s recommendations for creating a social media policy for your independent agency). 

With more insurers, including traditional direct writers, using multiple distribution methods, the stakes are higher than ever for agents to prove themselves invaluable to their customers — not just by meeting their insurance needs in a smart and timely way, but by engaging with them on multiple levels.

What’s your agency doing to build your brand perception with your customers?

London-based insurance broker Willis’s upcoming occupation of space in Chicago’s Sears Tower means a name change to the landmark Chicago building to Willis Tower. The name change officially goes into effect today.

In a Crain’s Chicago Business interview, Willis CEO Joseph Plumeri talked about naming rights, possible job relocations, and the fact that Willis will be competing on the home turf of giant competitor Aon. He stated that Willis did not pay extra for naming rights; it was included in the deal leasing 142,000 square feet, which will house 500 Willis employees.

Commenting on possible sensitivity around the renaming, Plumeri said:

You can call it the Big Willie, and that would be fine with me…I don’t mean that in a comedic way. (Chicago) is a town of neighborhoods and it’s a town of nicknames. And people in this town, when you call something by a nickname it’s not meant to be demeaning, because I come from the neighborhoods. It’s meant to be a term of endearment. So if they did that, that would be fine.

Hmmm. Aside from the salacious implications of a 110-story skyscraper being called Big Willie, Plumeri is apparently oblivious to the tenacity of Chicagoans about their traditions.

Take Marshall Field’s, for example. When Macy’s steamrolled into town and bought the venerable State Street department store in 2006, the deal included a name change and a complete rebranding. The public backlash was so intense — and Macy’s lost so much profit and goodwill — that management was changed several times, to little effect. Three years after the takeover, a May 2009 NBC poll shows that Chicagoans still hate Macy’s, and that hate is reflected in Macy’s declining stock price.

Granted, this sort of attitude is unlikely to affect Willis’s big business clients, but Willis and others could take a lesson from Macy’s. Renaming a beloved Chicago landmark after what sounds like a character in a 1970s blaxploitation movie might not generate a lot of positive feedback from Chicagoans.

Hey, it’s our second city complex — we’re just funny that way.

Conning’s recent study on property-casualty insurance distribution made some pretty obvious observations about its competition: specifically, that Web aggregators are giving traditional agents and brokers a run for their money by allowing prospects to get quotes directly online. However, the report observes that this same system’t built-in flaw is that most aggregator transactions are one-and-done deals that don’t yield repeat business. On the other hand, banks — the other “threat” in the Conning report — are leveraging both the ability to compare rates on the Web and building relationships with customers to ensure repeat business.

I’ve been around long enough to remember the pre-Gramm-Leach-Bliley days when everyone was worried about banks stealing business from independent agents. For the most part, that threat has proven unfounded. While biggies like Wells Fargo are aggressively pursuing agencies and brokerages for acquisitions — a trend that will probably increase as struggling financial institutions seek diversification in profitable businesses — banks, like direct writers, can’t really offer policyholders the service and relationship that agents can.

However, a while back another Conning study shed light on something that could be a more insidious threat to the independent insurance distribution system: property-casualty companies offshoring not only the “no-brainer” back-office functions they’ve been doing for 20 years, but “services requiring higher levels of intellectual capital,” including actuarial, claims and underwriting. 

This study indicates that the number of service providers offering such high-level functions are expected to grow over the next 5 years, from 33 percent to 58 percent. Moreover, formerly “cheap labor” countries like India are being bumped out by emerging economies where labor is even cheaper, like Russia, the Dominican Republic, Argentina and South Africa.

And although it wouldn’t seem that the services provided by independent agents would lend themselves to offshoring, one of the service areas offshore providers will be expanding over the next 5 years is customer relationship analysis — pretty sophisticated stuff for foreign guys in a far-flung service center.

Just gets you to thinking…