I have decided to completely reverse my feeling about online mega agencies such as Selectquote and Accuquote. I have repeatedly inferred that they are the scum of the life insurance industry, that volume of business is more important than customer service, and that their appetite for signing contracts for the largest compensation deals is decidedly customer unfriendly.
I stand by all of that, but I’m here to tell you that it is great for my business. I won’t ever put 100,000 policies in force in a year like Selectquote, but I don’t need to. I don’t have the advertising overhead that the big boys have. In fact, because of them I don’t have any advertising overhead at all. Two reasons for that. 1. They mess up and I write about it and, what can I say, people want to know how they fix their bad experience and 2. It seems like all the big agencies are daftly in love with ING Reliastar right now. That’s good for me because ING is one of the slowest underwriting companies on the street right now and their aggressive underwriting of two years ago must have gone upstream to spawn and it died there.
No criticism here though. I’m not biting the hand that feeds me. Wait, I changed my mind. I’m working with a client that called Accuquote a few weeks ago. After explaining to them that he had been diagnosed with Bipolar II, the agent told him that he was not insurable and should probably just buy accidental death insurance. Unless the agent was a retired underwriter that has worked for every company out there how could he possibly conclude that someone is uninsurable over the phone due to something that is commonly approved?
So, why would an agent do that? Why would they essentially blow someone off and tell them they not only don’t want their business but they even want to waste their time talking about it. YOU ARE UNINSURABLE. CLICK. BUZZ The answer is really simple and we’ve all heard it hundreds if not thousands of times. Time is MONEY!!!! The reason that the mega agencies can write tens of thousand of applications a year is that they avoid anything that takes more than their allotted amount of time. If you can’t ask the questions and quote the person and be off the phone and done with them in so many minutes, it’s not cost effective. This client was a piece of work. Not uninsurable due to bipolar disorder, just more work than the average policy. Hey, I like this one. Mega agencies are into fast break slam dunks and not into running the clock down looking for 3 pointers.
So I am grateful for the role that these Sam’s Clubs of Life Insurance play in the world. They blast through all the easy business and leave a wide enough swath of dissatisfaction behind them to feed all the agents that really care about customers and really believe that there is something that is right and honorable about working hard and not giving up on customers.
Bottom line. Healthy or not there are definitely two kinds of experiences you can have when purchasing life insurance. One is akin to a ride on a conveyor belt to a customer service dumpster and the other…well, call or email me directly. Let’s talk.
My experience with Select Quote for auto and home insurance was not good at all. You will probably do real good competing with SelectQuote, because they only care about selling the most policies they can. They don’t care about the customer on the auto and home side, which probably means the same thing for their life insurance business. First, I thought I was filling out information for them, but all of my info went out to what seemed like 10 different insurance agencies all wanting to sell me auto and home insurance. Now all of these lead companies or agencies have all of my info and they keep selling it to other companies. I had to change my phone number because they never stop calling. Also, during the quote with the SelectQuote agent, I got the feeling that he really didn’t know what he was doing, or didn’t care. He said he was licensed for 4 months. I don’t know if that is a long time or not, but he said there were only 3-4 people who have worked there longer. It just seemed like people who didn’t quite know what they were doing. Theytalked about credit reports, and drivers license numbers and my social security number. Now I feel like a fool for giving it to them, but I thought it would be OK because it sounded like this huge loud call center in the background. I think some people call it a boiler room? My agent has been with me for 12 years, and I just didn’t think I should do all of this important business on the phone just to save $90 a year. My agent is a pretty good guy and I think he would take care of me the best he could. After all, he is just an agent and can only do so much. He does not own the company. Switching to an agent I will never meet just didn’t seem right, especially since it would only save me about $7.50 a month. Even $20 a month isn’t enough for all the emails and faxes and phone calls back and forth just to get some paperwork done.