Retention Is the Whole Job

We've been tracking cancellations closely for two years. Not the report HawkSoft spits out. A real one, where my executive assistant Sofia, goes through every single cancellation by hand and pulls the details the AMS doesn't capture. 

Two things in my data that's bothering me. 

Bundled households are leaving at a higher rate than monoline accounts. That runs against everything the industry tells you about bundling as a retention shield. And our average client who cancels is somewhere between year three and year five. Not year one. Not the price shopper who was never going to stay. The client who has been with us long enough that we stopped paying attention. 

Once you know that, you can build something around it. Get ahead of renewal increases before the client sees the bill. Turn a premium-bearing endorsement into an account review, because adding a driver or changing an address moves the premium and that is a conversation, not a confirmation email. And when they call to cancel, actually try to save them and log that you tried. 

Everything else on the service side rolls up into that number. 

Tracking any of this is a challenge. Data hygiene in an agency is brutal. Holding the team to the standard is a job by itself, and it never ends. 

But we're better at this than we were two years ago. 

Then the harder part. Knowing the number does nothing. What you do with that information is the whole thing, and then you track your new efforts to see if they worked. It's a loop that never closes. 

Our cancellations are trending down. Some of that is rates stabilizing and carrier underwriting appetite improving. Some of it is the team getting ahead of accounts we would have lost a year ago. I'll take both. 

Don't just look at your retention number. Understand how it got there.