Why should agencies partner with Patra?

I’m Sharon Kern, senior vice president business development for the retail segment for Patra.

Patra can really tuck in to an agency to help them be more efficient, more productive, focus on top line, and allow us to manage the cost efficiencies that are gained by using somebody like us to reduce their operational costs.

In talking with hundreds of agencies and contacts of Patra who do business with us, everyone has the same challenge. They have a shortened workforce. They can’t attract people into the industry to join. A lot of people coming out of college don’t say, hey, I’m dying to get into insurance. They don’t have succession plans. The industry has been aging out for the last several years. There’s high workloads and really the number one thing that agencies want to focus on is performance and customer retention. And given the requirements and the risk mitigation associated with back office, if they’re overburdened by that, they can’t deliver the customer service that creates and confirms the brand that they have with the customer.

So a lot of those consequences are a result of lack of staff, and that’s where Patra really comes in. We can we can provide that relief and allow them to focus on what matters, which is selling more business and retaining the customers they have.

First of all, we have over five different service lines, so we want a solution for the customer based on what their challenge or problem is. We wanna solve for the problem, not sell them what we want them to have, and that’s super important. So the outcomes can be focused on different things within our service line.

So when we do the back office processing, we become really efficient because we don’t require them to pay for a full time equivalent. We charge for work that’s produced. We are efficient because we have tech enabled technologies to support the work that we’re doing. So just by virtue of all that, we’re gonna reduce their cost with inside the agency. So that’s on the OnDemand.

In Select, sometimes we do an ROI analysis. We said, okay, let’s talk about your small book business. Nine times out of ten, their small book business is at a loss. They aren’t earning any money on it. So what we can do is look at the average expense of employees doing it, the fact that it’s negative margins, and we can come up with a plan that gives them an annuity because we do a commission split. But we take on all the burden of the work, we have all the employees overhead expense, and we practice what we preach by also using our OnDemand services to support the back office. So we can become very efficient depending on the service model.

Another one, another version would be they don’t have administrative tasks that they can get done. So that’s another service line that’s super popular in our retail segment, which is virtual assistants. They become an extension of the company, and the return on the investment is that, again, they can’t attract the talent, they don’t have to deal with high turnover, because we’re gonna replace what they can’t do with our people.

On average, what we see in the industry is that if you take the gross sales of an agency, if they’re not spending at least two percent on outsourced servicing, they’re probably gonna be very, very inefficient. They’re probably spending more than they need to. So if they’ve never done outsourcing, which most people have to this day, but it’s an education for them. Right? But the other thing, the outcomes that they get is we can show based on how we perform the work as compared to the expense of them continuing to do it, what the savings will be. The work has to get done. It just comes down to decision. Who’s gonna do the work and at what price?

If you’re already experienced in one example in one office and you’ve got five offices that are resistant, let us work with those offices. Let us do an adoption program to understand and help them understand the value of what we bring to the table. Because you you’re fighting two things. You’re fighting resistance and change, and you’re fighting the fact that they don’t have the resources to do it. So we can help them overcome that by building the trust, showing them the results that we have, showing them actual case studies. This isn’t the first time we’ve done this. So that they can have the confidence that we can do the job that needs to be done.