Fair Workload in Your Opinion?

KenP

Expert
77
Curious what your personal experience is, or if you have any industry average numbers:

How many policies per head of staff in personal lines? I've heard between 1500-2000. Note by "head" I'd mean either pure CSRs or agents that have to do both sales and service.
 
Curious what your personal experience is, or if you have any industry average numbers:

How many policies per head of staff in personal lines? I've heard between 1500-2000. Note by "head" I'd mean either pure CSRs or agents that have to do both sales and service.

I used to be a staff member of a SF agent who had a 16mm book of business, 5000+ households. Comfortably there were 3 CSRs and 2 CSR/Sales people.

There was a time where there were only 2 CSR/Sales people and the Agent. It was possible to run the day to day operation - but not sustainable.

Hope that helps
 
Depends on what you want to accomplish. To grow, you need more, to shrink you need less. Hard to find the balance sometimes.

In general, I feel (using CSR as an all encompassing term, split with producers as you can):

1st CSR - 750 polices
2nd CSR - 1500-2000 policies
then add 1 per additional 1500 policies.

I'd actually highly recommend getting the first one in as early as possible, but I understand needing to put food on the table for the first few months as well.

The real bottom line is, if YOU are not focusing YOUR time on growing your agency, then you need another CSR so YOU can focus on growing YOUR agency and not taking routine phone calls or making policy changes.

Dan
 
Really appreciate the input you two have offered. It seems like what you're saying aligns with what I've seen elsewhere: Roughly 1500 policies per head. Higher servicing needs like monoline auto would probably bring that number down.

Overstaffing slightly isn't a huge detriment in this business like it would be in retail for instance. If the floors have been mopped, inventory's accounted for, etc., there's not a whole for the employees to do that isn't just make-work. If you don't have the customer demand coming through, it becomes nonproductive labor cost pretty quickly.

There's always proactive work that can be done: Run some ex-dates and get ahead of major rate increases with some remarkets. Make some account rounding calls to current clients. Plan a marketing campaign. Get some continuing education in. The list goes on.

I'm not the agency head, but I was given a new offer where I'll have a degree of directive control over the personal lines department; and these guys are in growth mode. From everything you guys are saying, it adds credence to the idea that I'd bias toward overstaffing a little than understaffing. Having some general guidelines and benchmarks with the numbers a lot more helpful, though, than just "how busy does the team feel" haha
 
More than 1,500 ACCOUNTS(?) is probably pushing it, particularly if there are multiple PL CSRs who will be taking vacation, sick leave, etc. and having to cover for each other plus account development and other tasks. If CSRs are handling upwards of 2,000 accounts, they quite possibly aren't providing much in the way of service that couldn't be handled via direct sales.

I posed this question to an agency management consultant several years ago and got this response:

There is no doubt that you will get info from all over the map on this one. Here's my take based on the following criteria (which, unfortunately in some cases, are typical of many agencies):

Automated agency.
Transactional filing.
90% standard business.
No service center involvement.
Upload/download data with carriers (particularly PL).
3 to 5 years experience for CSR.
Separate claims department.
Little or no sales accountabilities other than the normal "round if you can."

Personal Lines
The CSR should be able to handle $100,000 to $125,000 of commission income to the agency. This normally equates to 950 to 1200 accounts...not policies, but accounts. We are figuring, on a national average, that there are approximately 1.7 policies per account.

Commercial Lines
The CSR should be able to handle $200,000 to $300,000 in commission to the agency. This amount can go as high as $500,000 depending on the makeup of accounts.

Small commercial accounts are usually targeted at $10,000 of premium and less. We see the average agency CSR handling about $125,000 to $150,000 of commission income for these accounts.

Mid-sized usually over $10,000 of premium and under $100,000. The average agency CSR is handling $200,000 or more of commission to the agency.

Large/Jumbo accounts...these range in premium of $100,000 to ???
The CSR can handle $300,000 or more depending on how many accounts are involved.

I have one agency client with a very experienced CSR handling $600,000 of commission income with only THREE accounts. Hard to tell what or how these can distort the averages.
 
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