How Much More Work Could Your Current Staff Handle? Let's Find Out With The Productivity Calculator Below...

Increased Productivity = Increased Profitability. See What Greater Productivity Could Mean In Time, Workload And Dollars To Your Agency.

Before you jump down to the productivity calculator, there are a few things that need to be addressed first...

First, How Much Work Are Your CSRs Handling Today?

Before we talk about increasing productivity, we need to establish where your agency is today.

For personal lines, policies per CSR is a standard measurement of productivity. It provides a useful way to see how many policies each CSR is currently managing and to measure changes in productivity over time. For personal lines, industry research has found that CSRs commonly manage approximately 800–1,000 policies each. 

Commercial Lines is different. Policy count can still be useful for understanding your own agency, but the more standardized measurement for commercial lines is revenue or commissions per CSR. Policies per CSR isn't generally used because commercial accounts can vary significantly in size and complexity.

The calculator will first determine your agency's current Personal Lines and Commercial Lines policies per CSR.

Next, What Do We Mean By “Increasing Productivity”?

A 10%, 20% or 30% increase in productivity isn't just a percentage. It represents real additional work your existing staff can handle, real hours recovered, and real payroll value.

How many hours would that represent?
What is the payroll value of those hours?
How much additional personal lines business could your existing staff manage?
And how much additional CSR work would that represent?

What we don't know yet is how much of an increase in productivity your agency could actually achieve.

Bradley Chesnut, our founder and an insurance automation consultant for more than 30 years, measured the productivity results achieved by agencies he worked with during the 1990s and early 2000s. Bradley recommended a management system and helped them improve how their work was processed. The management system used at the time is no longer available.

Across those agencies, the average measured increase in productivity was 47.8%.

One agency provides a particularly good example. Before working with Brad, the staff was carrying unfinished work over from one day to the next because they simply couldn't get everything done. Six months later, after changing systems and improving how their work was processed—and while the agency continued to grow—the staff had so much additional time the owner bragged to Brad about how her staff was often playing solitaire on their computers during the day.

The point is, 10% or 20% isn't an unrealistic productivity increase when you understand agency workflows, know where unnecessary work is being created, and have a management system designed to support more productive ways of processing that work.

That's the knowledge and experience that ultimately went into the design of CP Manager.

We Need To Address The “Normal” Trap — When Inefficiency No Longer Looks Inefficient

One of the biggest obstacles to increasing productivity is surprisingly simple: the way work is being processed today feels normal.

Your CSRs know your management system. They know which screens to open, where to look for information, what has to be entered again, and the workarounds required to keep everything moving.

After doing that same work hundreds or thousands of times, nobody stops to question whether all of those steps are necessary in the first place.

That's the “normal” trap.

Our founder, Bradley, shares a perfect example of this while he was conducting a productivity workshop for a group of CSRs representing 49 agencies. An agency owner sent five CSRs to the workshop, and before Bradley even started, their lead CSR made it very clear they didn't think they needed to be there: “I don't know why we're here. We're already using our system very efficiently.”

By lunchtime, she couldn't get to Bradley fast enough. “Okay, I'm blown away. What you taught us this morning will easily increase our productivity by at least another 10%.”

By the end of the workshop, she believed what they had learned would increase their productivity by at least 20%.

What changed?

Not their management system. Not their experience. Not how hard they worked. What changed was their understanding of how the work could be processed more efficiently.

That's why the “normal” trap can be so difficult to recognize. You can't see unnecessary work as unnecessary when it's simply the way you've always done it.

A CSR can be extremely proficient with a management system and still be working through an inefficient process. Those are two very different things.

The inefficiency is seldom one enormous problem that's easy to spot. It's usually a collection of small things—a few unnecessary steps here, a couple of minutes searching there, information entered more than once, leaving one task to find something needed to finish it, jumping between different areas of the system to keep track of work in progress.

Each one seems insignificant by itself. But repeat those little inefficiencies hundreds of times every week, across every CSR in the agency, and they consume a surprising amount of time.

That's why simply looking at how busy your staff is doesn't tell you how productive the agency is. The better question is:

How much of what your staff does every day is actually necessary to process the work—and how much of it exists because that's simply how the system requires the work to be done?

Finally, Management Systems Are Not Created Equal And Don't Produce The Same Level Of Productivity

Most agency management systems provide many of the same core functions. They all have policies, notes, follow ups, attachments, correspondence and other core features. But having the same features doesn't mean they require the same amount of work to use them.

That's an important distinction when you're evaluating productivity.

Two systems can both allow a CSR to process an endorsement, manage a renewal, send an email or follow up on an activity. But one may require considerably more steps, more navigation, more searching and more re-entry to accomplish exactly the same work.

Multiply those differences across every policy task a CSR processes throughout the day and the management system itself becomes a major factor in how much work that CSR can get done.

And this takes us right back to the “normal” we just discussed. If your staff has used the same system for years, the number of steps it takes to process the work doesn't necessarily feel excessive. It's simply how the work gets done.

That's why the amount of productivity available to recover will be different from one agency to another. The management system you're using today—and how your agency processes its work within that system—matters.

Now, Let's Run Your Numbers...

Now, How Much Of An Increase In Productivity Is Really Possible?

You controlled the Productivity Increase percentage in the calculator. Did you try 10%, 20% and 30% to see how each would affect your agency?

Did you notice how many more Personal Lines policies each CSR could manage as you increased the productivity percentage?

The difference can be significant—allowing your existing staff to manage considerably more business, which has a direct impact on agency profitability.

Now let me challenge one of the industry's accepted productivity standards.

Industry-wide, a Personal Lines CSR commonly manages approximately 800–1,000 policies. After three decades of helping agencies increase their productivity, our founder believes a CSR should be able to manage twice that number.

That's how much unnecessary work he believes has become accepted as "normal" in this industry.

Now The Important Question: Where Does That Additional Productivity Come From?

Some may think there's one main thing consuming all that time. There isn't. As we discussed earlier, it's dozens of little inefficiencies repeated hundreds of times every week.

Additional productivity comes from eliminating unnecessary work throughout the day—fewer steps, less re-entry, less hunting for information, better management of work in progress, and workflows designed around how agency work actually gets done.

That's what CP Manager was designed to do.

When you eliminate the “System Scavenger Hunt” and numerous other small inefficiencies that steal time throughout the day, that recovered time can be put back to productive use.

What Could Your Agency Do With That Additional Productivity?

When your staff is doing more work in less time, this creates new opportunities for the agency:

• Get More Work Done With Existing Staff: Handle more business with the team you already have.
• Delay Expensive New Hires: Grow longer before needing to add another CSR—and another full-time salary.
• Reduce CSR Burnout: Give your team their 4:30 PM finish back by reducing the unnecessary work consuming their day.
• Put The Time Toward Growth: Use additional CSR time for cross-selling, retention and strengthening client relationships instead of administrative friction.

For new and small agencies, this can be especially important. Going longer before needing to hire a CSR when cash flow is tight allows you to grow the agency to higher income levels before taking on another full-time salary.

Ready to See How These Hours Are Recovered in Real Time?

Two options. Pick the one best for you, or do both.

Option A: Watch the 7-Min Video Breakdown: 5 Places Legacy Systems Drain Staff Time

Watch...

Option B: Schedule Your 45-Minute Productivity Walk-Through

This isn't a typical software walk-through built around showing you a long list of features.

We'll show you how CP Manager was designed to reduce the amount of work required to process agency business.

You'll see the workflow-driven design, the business logic working in the background, the “One-Window Workspace,” My Activities, and other ways CP Manager eliminates unnecessary steps and helps your staff get more work done.

If you watched the video above, you've already seen a few examples. The Productivity Walk-Through lets you see how all of this works together inside CP Manager.

Schedule Your 45-Minute Productivity Walk-Through