Catching Mistakes Before They Cost You

People make mistakes. We all know this. We understand that mistakes happen, yet what does your agency do to protect against it?

We like to promote the usefulness of systems. They help to create consistency not just for your clients, but also for your employees and yourself. They are designed to prevent mistakes. Yet, we know that they will not prevent every single mistake.

Mistakes happen, but it’s better if you catch them early. By having the right checks and balances in place you can make sure the systems are being used correctly and the results you expect to achieve are being reached.

Here are two things you can do to create systems that have checks and balances:

• Use Checklists. Many people groan at the idea of checklists, but they persist because they work. Even airplane pilots use them before every single flight. Even if they’ve flown hundreds of times. Why? Because we’re human. We get distracted. We get busy and we forget to do something. We think we did it, but was that for this change or was that for another client? Checklists WORK!
   
  • Pro-tip: If you use a CRM, check to see if it has a way of automating some of the tasks. For instance, writing a homeowners policy may trigger a task for pictures to be taken and a client signature to be obtained. This can replace paper checklists.

• Use Reports. Expect that mistakes will happen and look for ways to find them, before they find you. There are ways to pull reports that will help you achieve the checks and balances that systems need. For instance, if you want to check that all prospects given a quote are entered into your CRM, you might be able to pull a list from your broker of all new prospects that were quoted this month. On your CRM you may be able to pull a list of the prospects entered during the same month to ensure that everyone was not only entered into the CRM, but that they also have a next action set. That next action might be setting them up as a client or it could be a call next year near their renewal date. And by you, we mean your business. This doesn’t have to be done by the agent.
   
  • Pro-Tip: You may be able to pull both reports into Excel and easily find the ones that don’t match. If you build the Excel spreadsheet with formulas, the work is done automatically. It takes five minutes to simply verify the work was done without mistakes.

Systems take time to create. And great systems take time to execute. It’s hard for many agencies to stop to create systems when they are already extremely busy. This week we encourage you to look at how creating and executing great systems is an investment in your business.

Imagine what its worth to your business to minimize mistakes and catch them before they lead to client issues, E&O issues, or worse. Imagine what it’s like when your business is not only running like a machine, but has the checks and balances in place to give you peace of mind that things are getting done correctly.

And when you’re ready to talk in depth about how to achieve that vision, give us a call. We know the roadmap and have the tools to get you there.