Insurance Efficiency: How Top Agencies Get More Done With Fewer People

Do you struggle with insurance efficiency? When you know the numbers or compare them to your peers, do you have  more questions than answers? We encourage agencies to not just be efficient, but also be effective. 

So often we hear from agency team members that they need more people. However, more people can lead to more problems. Also, more people isn’t an immediate solution. It takes time to find them, train them and there is no guarantee that the person will be a great fit.

When we look at more people at an agency we want to ensure we are looking at everything we can do to help support efficiency. 

Step 1: Evaluate The Current Processes

There is so much that can be learned about insurance efficiency when you break out your agency’s processes and sit down with each team member and how the process interacts in real life. 

When I come into agencies and help evaluate insurance efficiency, I always like to identify first and foremost, is the team following the processes. For many team members the processes (if they aren’t audited) can easily be modified or a corner cut here and there. Unfortunately, this may lead to more inefficiency. If your agency doesn’t have processes, think about checking out pre-made processes you can tailor for your agency. 

As you are looking at your agency’s processes you want to be thinking what can we trim, trash, delegate or automate. For each process there is always room to make them more efficient. One big area we see is the ability to complete first call resolution.

Step 2: Identify Scaling Work

Your agency may need more hands but do they need to be licensed? For many agencies they may not need another licensed person they need unlicensed support. Why would you pay a licensed team member to do non-licensed work? You can streamline your licensed team to be more efficient and effective by hiring entry level team members or Virtual Assistants. 

Here is a list of items non-licensed team members can help handle: 

• Answering phones
• Payments (in most states)
• Mortgagee changes
• Auto ID cards
• Basic certificates
• Late payment follow up
• Data entry
• Back-end quoting
• Follow up

You can see you can keep your team talking to clients and ensuring they have the right coverage while taking critical back-end work off of them. 

Step 3: Review Your Book

So often insurance efficiency becomes a struggle because the book is inefficient. We love to dive deep into the agency’s activities to see where they are spending their time. 

Here are the biggest areas we see that agencies can pick up efficiency: 

• Working to get clients on Automated Payments: 
  • Asking current clients
  • Writing new business and rewrites on automated payments
• Walk In Inquiries: can we encourage appointments?
• Endorsements: can someone take the information and have another person process
• Remarkets: if you automatically remarket, you may want to stop immediately – instead, lean on renewal reviews as the return on this is very minimal and you are training your clients to think about price

We recommend you start with agency standards (which we review in our agency efficiency program) this will help you set clear and healthy boundaries with your clients and allow your team to focus not on being a collection agent but to instead help counsel clients on their insurance. Sometimes we make things much harder than we realize!

Conclusion

True insurance agency efficiency isn’t about hiring your way out of chaos—it’s about removing the chaos altogether. By ruthlessly auditing and tightening processes, offloading non-licensed work to lower-cost support (or automation), and cleaning up an inefficient book with smart standards like automated payments and appointment-only inquiries, most agencies can free up 20-40% of their team’s time without adding a single new license.

That reclaimed capacity doesn’t just reduce stress; it becomes your growth engine—more proactive renewal reviews, deeper client relationships, higher close ratios on cross-sells, and the bandwidth to deliver the kind of service that makes clients stay for decades.

Stop treating “we need more people” as the default answer. Start with the harder, higher-leverage question: “How do we get dramatically more done with the people we already have?” Get the processes right, support your licensed team properly, and set clear client boundaries. The result? A leaner, happier, more profitable agency that scales smoothly instead of constantly playing catch-up. 

Ready to make efficiency your superpower? Let’s talk.

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