**Heavy on industry thoughts

1. I think they can do so much of a better job driving business.  Yup, driving business to them.  Depending on where you look, several hundred million dollars are sent simply to get attention.  That’s really all it is.  Attention.  Because once they get there, where is the follow through?

2. Misunderstanding of branding versus spam.  There is a  big difference.  Continuing to tell me about you is not going to cut it.  It already isn’t so the sooner we can stop that behavior the better.  Advertising or talking about anything that requires fine print and is not standard with your product is no longer going to cut it.  tell me about the good stuff.  Tell me about why your product/service is what I want to buy.  Oh and if it is not worth talking about make it worth talking about.

3. Mistreating your core customers.  Big problem.  I don’t get it.  You take the profits from current customers to get yourself new customers.  Think about it, in theory that makes sense.  But at some point lets stop and look at what would happen if instead of churning business we churned up good feelings.  We held the line on rates for a year or so and gave them a reason to say.  Remember the point above, give them a reason to talk about you.  Good things.  Control the conversation.  Then, when this happens the customers will come to you instead of leaving.  Let the millions of customers you have positively advertise for you instead of leaving with bad feelings.

4. Rate increases are bad for everyone.  See the points above.  You raise the rate for a customer with no apparent cause which is terrible.  Or you raise them for simply using the policy that they pay for.  Then the customer wants to go.  So now you may have lost a profitable account and possibly hindered getting this profitable customer back in the future.  So now they leave and you discount points 2 and 3 above.  Now if you are a captive you have even less of a chance of getting them back. If you are working with brokers, the broker should be able to keep the client but likely at a lower rate.  More importantly they have to give time which as we know cust into profits.  So are rate increases worth it? Doubt it.

So lets get back to a partnership.  Let your agents drive the business to you.  Give me a better product to bring to people.  Give me a reason to keep the insured with you.  Take my time away from trying to save customers and instead I’ll be able to focus on bringing you more business.  Lets redefine the roles we play in the transaction.  We do that, we’ll all make more but all the while, the insured will have a lower rate.

Just some thoughts.