I Stopped Waiting for Reviews

Monday a conversation in our queue got flagged as trending negative. A client who'd been fighting the same problem for weeks and was running out of patience. 

I read the thread. My agent technically hadn't done anything wrong. There was a claim on this client's record that wasn't hers, and it was one of two the carrier used to issue a non-renewal. We got the non-renewal reversed. However, the claim was still showing on her record. My agent told the client she could call the carrier's claims department and request it be removed, which is true and is a reasonable call to make most days. 

However, I didn't agree with that call for this specific scenario. This claim never belonged on her policy in the first place and it was about to cause her a non-renewal. No room for error on that one. My agent should have picked up the phone and called claims herself. If claims had told her the insured has to make the request, fine, different conversation, and we walk the client through it. But we should have been the ones to find that out. 

I'm not saying we do everything for clients. We can't and we shouldn't. But this client had already explained the whole thing to the carrier and given a recorded statement during the claims process, and my agent kept sending her the same claim department phone number in four separate emails asking her to call to correct it. The client was upset she had to call when it wasn't her fault, and she had already communicated this to the carrier. 

Two things allowed me to catch it. Every client and prospect email in my agency runs through a shared inbox I have access to, and now we're recently beta testing a new Help Scout feature that reads all of those emails and scores the sentiment. The shared inbox visibility is the part most agencies don't have. If your team’s email sits in fifteen separate Outlook accounts before they are saved in your AMS/CRM, you and your leadership can’t find challenges in real time and take action before they become a problem.  

I've always been a fan of spot checking. It's how I find coaching opportunities and how I catch my team doing a great job. But finding the time to dig through random emails, calls, and tasks is hard, and the juice isn't always worth the squeeze. 

That math just changed. The feature scores every conversation positive, negative, neutral, or improving, open or closed. The open ones I can still step into. The closed ones become coaching. When AI reads every email and points me at the ones that need me, spot checking becomes exponentially more effective.  

It can also flag positive interactions that I probably would never catch. You can hover over the sentiment score, and you get a short AI summary. I found one the client needed a certificate of insurance, my staff turned it around super-fast, and the client wrote back that it was "AMAZINGLY fast." All caps. We didn’t get a rating, but I was able to spot it because of this new feature. I gave that agent credit for work that would have disappeared. 

We've used Help Scout happiness ratings since we went live. We've gotten 167 ratings in sixteen months. What I’ve found is people rate when they're delighted or when they're mad. What I’ve found is that most of the work sits in the middle and is probably overlooked by leadership.  

One more thing. Here's my Help Scout referral link:

Transparently, if you sign up for Help Scout through my referral link, I get a small referral fee. When I moved my agency onto Help Scout, I couldn't call another agent and ask how it went, the way I could with HawkSoft, Agency Zoom, RingCentral or other well know vendors in our space. I took a huge risk using it in my agency, and now you don't have to. 

It's not plug and play. Not much good software is. There's real work to customize it and train your team, and that's where most agencies stall. We've walked other agencies through this rollout. If you want the same, email me at michael.cruz@foresighti.com and we can see if it's a fit.