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Transcript:
Chip: Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the IA Advantage. My name is Chip Bacciocco, and if you’re joining us today, you are likely one of the tens of thousands of independent agency channel insurance professionals working all across America doing the noble work of protecting the futures of millions of families and businesses.
Some housekeeping before we get started. This program is made possible through the support of TrustedChoice.com and the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America, the Big I. Today’s broadcast will be made available to over 300,000 IA professionals across North America via the Trusted Choice Independent Agency Network.
And as always, before we start, I want to urge you to make sure that your agency’s digital profile on TrustedChoice.com is complete and up to date. 2023 has been a transformative year for us. Referral volume has more than doubled. Please visit our site and hear what agents just like you are saying about TrustedChoice.com, especially about Claim-it, which is completely transforming the way agents find and acquire high quality exclusive referrals — the same way Uber transformed the taxi industry a few years ago.
And of course, don’t forget Google continues to crawl our agency directory every hour. Having a complete and professional agency profile on TrustedChoice.com ensures that your agency is being properly recognized and showcased on the nation’s most important online agency directory.
We’re doing something a little different today because we have a lot of questions from agents across the country to answer. And we have a big announcement as well. So today, my guests are members of my very own TrustedChoice.com team. With me today are Jen Frey, Vice President of Product, and Justin Biggs, Vice President of Distribution. Welcome, Jen. Welcome, Justin.
Jen: Thank you.
Justin: Good morning. It’s good to be here.
Chip: This is a little unusual. Normally, we have a guest from another company but there’s so much to talk about. We’ve had so many questions. I thought this would be an efficient way for us to share and hopefully get some good feedback and so forth. So, before we get into the announcements, and before we start kind of drilling down in the details of some of these questions that we’ve gotten, why don’t you two just introduce yourselves for a minute and tell everybody in the audience what your role is at TrustedChoice.com. Jen, you first.
Jen: Thanks, Chip. Yeah. As VP of Product at TrustedChoice.com, I have been here over six years. So it’s been a while. So I’ve actually seen a lot going on with the product over these past few years. I’ve worked with Chip for a while and we’ve grown and changed the product a ton.
I focus a lot on just prioritizing the features and really thinking about the IA channel. All the customers associated with it and try to put the best product out there for all those independent agents.
Chip: Awesome. Justin?
Justin: And I’m Justin Biggs, Vice President of Distribution here at TrustedChoice.com. I’m based in Granville, Ohio, just outside of Columbus. And I’m very focused on Claim-it as we’ll talk a lot about today. That involves supporting our, our lead partners as well as some of our company partners. And then on the distribution side, working with our agents on how to be more successful and get more of them participating in Claim-it.
Chip: Perfect. Well, I invited the right two people to the podcast. I’m so excited. So we’re going to talk a lot about Claim-it today because that’s what agents have a lot of questions about, as you know. But before we get there, I want to talk about the challenge that we are fundamentally trying to solve for independent agents.
And and that’s where Claim-it originates, right? We have been in a position now for 10 years to really observe some very interesting factors about how the independent agency channel works and Jen, I know we’ve got a lot of data. So what would you share? For example, how many Consumer Choice referrals and direct-to-agent phone calls have we delivered over the past 10 years to independent agents across the country?
Jen: Sure. Yeah, we have been tracking the data 10 years. The referrals come in really we’re at about a million total over the past 10 years worth of data. If we were to kind of break it down, I’d say, what, a little over 500,000 a year are those consumers that come to TrustedChoice.com and pick up the phone and call an agent.
And then the other, you know, a little bit more half or some, I don’t know, a good percent percent. More of them. There’s a few more that enter the funnel. So our find a recommended agent funnel. And so they’re going through that experience and they select an agent — one, two or three agents at the end of our funnel. So there’s another over 500,000 plus over the past 10 years that we’ve collected data on.
Chip: I want to give the audience a little context. There are different ways. So we have these internal categories of what kind of a referral is it really has to do with the machinery of how does it get there and then how does the how does the consumer choose? Because it’s all about choice, right? The trusted choice, consumer choice. How does the consumer choose to actually connect with that agent? Sometimes they like to fill out a form. You know, there are people that like that. Sometimes they want to pick up the phone and call an agent.
We’re able to provide both mechanisms and we can, we can count and see both. And they’ve evolved over the 10 years long time. It’s evolved over the years and we’ve sort of evolved some of the machinery. Now let’s talk about the disposition of those million plus referrals, where the agent, I’m sorry, the consumer chose an agent that they wanted to talk to, I want to talk to the Jones agency about my pizza shop or about my house or whatever it is.
The disposition data we have not shared much on, like what happens after that. And in part because we want to keep improving it and we’re always, it’s part of the process that we’re working on perfecting. But we should share some today, because 10 years is a long time. We’ve seen a pattern and in particular a couple patterns that have been stubborn or consistent.
So share a little bit about the disposition of those.
Jen: Yeah, we’ve right. We obviously have a, a lot of traffic on TrustedChoice.com. So those that do come through and connect with an agent or what the way we talk about it is they’ve found an agent on TrustedChoice.com and they’ve selected that to be the best agent for them.
So, once this happens, the consumer selects an agent 1, or there are, they can select up to 3 possible best fitting agents for them after they filled out the form. That information is sent over to the best agents that they’ve selected.
And, I don’t like to report that we don’t have the best close rate of these agents. These agents aren’t responding to the emails. They’re not picking up the phone. If the consumer decides to call them if they find the phone number on TrustedChoice.com, you know, they’ll leave a message if they send our form, the form goes to the agent and the agent might not respond. They might not call. Or if they do, they maybe wait a little long. So our data, we’ve definitely been researching it and covering it for as long as I can remember, always trying to improve it. And I would say we’re probably right around 33% of those agents never contact or respond to the consumer that wants to talk to them, like those super high intent folks that are trying to connect with that agent. So always looking to up that number and get that connection to be successful. There’s one other point because we do track the data really closely and I obviously getting better at that. But, like, yeah, we’ll go through and look at we’ll do our own little secret shopping kind of…look at the tool, look at the product and put ourselves out there, our internal team members, and just walk through our whole experience and wait and see if an agent calls back or if an agent contacts me. So, yeah, again, it’s about one in 3 times and I’m reaching out to an agent that I’ll get a call back or a response.
Chip: Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s very strange. We’ll share a little bit about the, the, we also get feedback from the consumers, right? So over the years we’ve collected we have a tool that allows us to sort of pull the consumer after the product they had. How did it go? Share a little bit about the most common negative response. We get lots of positive ones, but share the most common negative response from consumers.
Jen: Yeah, number one response feedback we get is that the agent doesn’t either answer the phone or respond or call back or email back. So there’s. They don’t call back.
Chip: No one ever, I’ve read it many times in the, you know, we can see the form that can type, the consumer can type, but no one ever contacted me. It’s the number one. I’ve seen it.
Jen: “Waiting for a call!”
Chip: Yeah. Hundreds of times. Yeah. So just to sum it up, a million opportunities delivered a staggering percentage of the time. If it’s, for example, an email referral they simply never even open the agent doesn’t open the email. So they clearly never contacted the consumer.
That could be as much as it’s very a little bit over the years, but around a third is sort of the average for that. And and the risk. And then when we look at consumer feedback, the most common complaint is no one ever contacted me. We’ve done secret shoppers. We did one a few weeks ago where I was personally, through a friend, I was the secret shopper and one of the replies, and this is typical, it’s not like one example. This is what we’ve seen over the years. We’ve had lots of people do this. You know, we’ll hear back the next day, but it’ll take a whole day. If somebody does reply, they’ll call, they’ll call the next day. That’s way too long, or they’ll never call at all. The agent will never reach out. I rarely, but it does happen occasionally, but rarely get some kind of contact in that first five minutes. And that’s what we want. What we want is the agent to immediately say, thanks for choosing me. I can help you. Let’s talk. And it’s fine if the agent wants to schedule it. Our tool allows for the agency — “Let’s talk at this time. I’m busy right now. Well, let’s talk at 2 p. m. today or whatever.” And that holds that shopper in place. That’s a, that’s an acceptable response according to the, to the consumer, but no response at all or waiting an indefinite period of time is just too frequent.
So, that’s what we’ve seen. It’s been 10 years of that. We have, as I said, a million records to look at. And the pattern has, has stayed stubbornly that way.
So I’m going to switch to Justin and Justin, you get kind of the fun part here. What was our, what have we concluded? Now, you know, some people say you’re saying agents are lazy. No, we’re not. Although there were times when we said agents are lazy, but that’s not a scientific conclusion. But, but we have come up with a conclusion. Justin, what, what’s our conclusion?
Justin: We have, it’s agents are busy and they’re really busy, more busy than they even realize themselves sometimes. And so when a, you know, request comes in from a new prospect at a random time, they might be, you know, helping an existing customer. They might be doing some training, they might be working with their staff and they’re just not prepared at that exact moment in time to take that request from the consumer. And I think going back to some of the earlier points about, you know, in this Amazon Prime age, everyone’s used to, you know, being able to order something and it gets there the same day the consumer is looking to get an immediate gratification to their response and immediate someone helping them out. And when that doesn’t happen, they’re going to continue to, to shop or find someone who will talk to them.
Chip: Yeah, absolutely right. We’ve even given them a name. We call it the Producer Availability Problem. And, and we believe, and I’m, I’m sure this is true, it is systemically an IA channel problem. It’s not one agency. It’s not two agencies. It’s systemic. And the reason it’s systemic is the way we are organized. If you think about the IA channel, it’s a very fractured industry. There are 35,000 independent insurance agencies in America. Some people say a little more, some people say a little less. Let’s just agree it’s 35,000-ish. That’s a very fractured marketplace. And the Big I has done many great studies over the years on what is a, what is a typical insurance agency look like? What’s the average size? How many people? What do they do? Where are they? You know, all these things. What are they? Right? What’s their territory? And the typical agency is relatively small, which means, let’s suppose they have 3 or 4 producers. In that in that agency. The odds of you calling at any given moment out of the blue and not having all three of them busy helping another customer or in a meeting, or one of them’s on vacation, or it’s their lunch hour, a million other things. The odds of you happen to call exactly when one of those three is sitting there doing absolutely nothing but waiting for the phone to ring is nil. It is so low. And that’s what all of our studies and all of our data has proven to us is too fractured. There’s a great example that the large, you know, take a look at the large captive agents, right? I always use this example. Jake at State Farm. You know, Jake, if you call right now, State Farm, you’ll get to talk to somebody that can help you. And I don’t know, 30 seconds, something like that. And that’s because there are thousands of State Farm agents, right? They have the sophisticated phone system. And if the 1st person’s busy and the 2nd and the 3rd, the 4th is on vacation, the 5th is in a meeting, and they just go right down the row and four microseconds until they find the one that’s actually available to help you right now. And that’s the one that actually picks up the phone and boom. We can’t do that in the independent agency channel. We don’t scale like a large captive agency does. And that’s, that’s the systemic problem that we have, right?
How do we help a consumer connect with an agent that’s not only the right agent for them right now, meaning that they’re qualified to help and they’re interested in helping them in terms of what kind of business it is, what kind of coverage they need and so forth. So we want to find the right agent, the most qualified agent, the best agent, which we’ve always done. That’s what our agency recommendation engine does. But the problem we have been missing is that availability factor. And that’s the problem that TrustedChoice.com has been setting about to solve for the IA channel for the last year and a half, two years.
And we have really made a lot of progress. And that’s why we’re getting all these questions, because agents are starting to talk about Claim-it. So I’m going to switch over to you again, Justin. What is Claim-it and why does it solve the Producer Availability Problem?
Justin: Yeah. Claim-it is our real time lead distribution platform. And so when a consumer comes in either via TrustedChoice.com or one of our partners and is searching for insurance, we’re taking a look at the information we have in our database and locating the best agents for that consumer. We’re sending out notifications to all of those agents and letting them know kind of everything we know about that insurance situation, other than the person’s contact information. And whichever agent is available in that exact moment to work on it can click the link from that notification, purchase the referral, and they buy it exclusively. So it’s not being sold to four, five, six other agents. It’s theirs exclusively, and they can start to work on it immediately.
Chip: Now, do these these referrals, and by the way, if you haven’t figured it out by now, we don’t like the word lead. We know that agents talk about the concept of an opportunity being delivered to you. Hey, there’s a customer that could use your help, blah, blah, blah. The general word for that is lead. But we don’t like it because it doesn’t describe all the factors that come with what we want to deliver to independent agents.
We don’t think agents want a list of people to call about their home insurance. That’s basically, at best, a warm call list, usually a cold call list. We want a real referral. And we have a couple criteria for what that means, Justin. Would you share a little bit about what we, why we call it a Claim-it referral and not a lead?
Justin: Yes, I think the most important thing is the intent. This is an actual human who is searching for insurance trying to solve an insurance problem. And it’s not, you know, just a scraped list or some sort of marketing that’s out there, that’s just trying to, you know, save them five bucks a month or get someone who’s super price conscious to to just shop it. They’re not really interested besides being the intent being really high, they’re also organically generated they’re in real time. Again, we’re selling them exclusively, and we think that, you know, those things in totality make a referral much different than the typical industry lead.
Chip: What about appetite sensitivity? Do do we pay attention to that as well?
Justin: Absolutely. Yeah, that’s a big part of the process as we ingest that and are looking at which agents we want to notify. We’re taking a look at what kind of business they want to write just from the settings we have in our back end, and we’re only matching those consumers to the agents who want to write that type of business.
Chip: And they can change that appetite? They can configure that, adjust it whenever they want?
Justin: Yeah, that’s really easy to do. They can do it themselves or you know, my team is happy to help them make those adjustments to their appetites as well.
Chip: And I want to be really clear about another thing that leads typically are not but that Claim-it referrals are. Talk about exclusivity a little bit to the agent.
Justin: Yeah, exclusivity I think is so huge for both the consumer experience and the agent experience. There’s a lot of, the typical lead providers out there who are selling it’s called LEGS is kind of the industry standard term. And so they’re going to sell it once to a Farmer’s agent and once to a State Farm agent and then once to, you know, they’re going to try to cover 5 or 6 different companies with the with the goal that the person can 6 different quotes from different companies.
But, you know, we’re selling to a truly independent agent who can give them the multitude of options from just one point of contact. And so, you know, their cell phone is not getting blown up by five or six different people who are racing to be the first one to get in touch with them right after they fill out that form.
Chip: Yeah. So another question I’ve gotten quite a bit agents that lots of agents have tried lots of lead programs over the years. And one of the factors they don’t like is that, well, you know, I signed up and for their hundred lead program and in came and I had to pay for all of them, even though I never really got to work on a bunch of them, I was, et cetera, how does our method work in terms of that? What happens if you get notified as a Trusted Choice Claim-it agent for an opportunity, and you don’t want to work on it right now. What does that cost?
Justin: That costs nothing! That’s the one of the best features of the program. If you’re not available to work on it, if you don’t want to work on it, just ignore it and wait for the next one to come through when you’re when you’re ready and able to pick up the phone and give him a call.
Chip: Yeah. And why are we not worried about that being a bad consumer experience? So the agent just ignores the ignores the notification. Yeah. This pizza shop owner needs work. Why are we not like that? That’s okay. Ignore it if you want.
Justin: Yeah. And that’s why we’re, we’re identifying that pool of agents who are in that local area and notifying all of them knowing, you know, 70% of them may not be available to work on them, but there is going to be that one agent who has the 15 minutes that they can claim it, give them a call and get the process started.
Chip: Absolutely. So, so the technical word for this right is crowdsourced. This is a, that’s what makes this so different from anything else. It’s why we are actually applying for a patent for how claim it works. It’s a crowdsource solution. So we’re going to, we’re going to first identify all the agents that we know are qualified expert and have an interest in that opportunity and say the Cincinnati area or whatever. We’re going to notify them all and then they get to choose the individual producers choose whether they’re going to work on it or not, that also determines who’s going to pay for that opportunity and only that opportunity. It’s exclusive to the one. So it’s it’s a totally unique we’ve sort of turned the lead business which used to be push, where all of the lead vendor would just push a bunch of opportunities and an agent willy nilly whenever they, here you go, here’s your five auto leads for the day or whatever. We turn it around and it’s a pull model. The producer is solely in charge and they can pull opportunities toward themselves whenever they want and they can choose to not do it whenever they want. So I think all those things, that’s why I’ll get back to my original question. They’re not leads, are they? We don’t call them leads. They’re not leads. There’s something very unique.
So all right. Well, a couple more questions for Justin. Then I want to get back to Jen because Jen actually is the person since she’s the VP of Product. She actually knows how it works. Justin and I are just making this up. So Jen will correct whatever we got wrong.
What are the agents saying about it? So you see, you’re getting the feedback, right? You manage the team. What are, what are agents reporting back in general about it?
Justin: Yeah. Agents are having really great success with Claim-it, both with kind of the traditional data referrals, as well as the, the newer warm transfer calls that we’re offering as well.
We have a, a bunch of success stories that are specific to Claim-it with agents reporting close ratios, anywhere from 30 to 70%.
Chip: That’s amazing. And what about ROI? And I know, you know, it’s, agents aren’t the best at calculating ROIs, but how many stories have we, did you say how many stories we’ve collected? Like, like, recorded audio, video stories, did you say?
Justin: I didn’t, I think it’s almost 300 and not all of those are obviously specific to Claim-it. But yeah, a ton of stories about you know, just the products in general and then some that are really just specific to Claim-it talking about their success that they’ve had with large accounts and good accounts they’re selling based off of these referrals.
Chip: And what are they seeing in terms of return on their investment on average? Typically?
Justin: Yeah, we’ve heard anywhere from, you know, a couple 100%, north of 500%. So they’re seeing some really good returns on these for sure.
Chip: Yeah, there’s some of that because we’ve seen several times that you know, an agent writes a big account and suddenly that really changes the math, doesn’t it?
Justin: Yeah, I mean, some of these guys who, you know, they’ll talk specifically about writing $30,000 accounts, and you do the math on, you know, they paid maybe 30 for that referral, and that’s, that’s pretty good, pretty good numbers.
Chip: Yeah, it is, it is. And they don’t all do that, we’re not saying that at all, but even the ones that are just writing sort of consistent volume, I haven’t heard anyone report less than 100% ROI on Claim-it so far that I know of.
Let’s talk a little bit about the announcement. So there is an announcement. I’m going to do the announcement part and we’re going to go back to Jen. She’ll fix everything we got wrong. So, Claim-it, since we started, it has come as part of our Advantage Professional agency subscription. And it is an agency subscription. So it’s sort of an enterprise subscription. You get a number of benefits for that. You get a premium profile in the agency directory. You get a lot of SEO. You know what, I’m going to save all these details for Jen. I’m going to screw it up. But anyway, it comes with an agency profile. You got to buy the whole thing and then you can choose as many producers as you want. What this has left out is, and this is you know, we have this massive growth in the number of Claim-it opportunities coming through the pipe. Well, I haven’t covered that. We’ll cover that in a minute. So we want to make it available to more producers and I feel like we’re leaving out a little bit so far producers that happen to work at an agency that, for whatever reason, doesn’t want to sign up for the agency subscription and get the full package. And we’re like, you know what, we could unbundle Claim-it. We could pull that off, segregate it out and just make it available to individual producers at any agency that, that that might want it. And so we are doing that. So I believe in the next week or so, actually, it’s already, what am I saying? We’ve already, we’ve already sold a couple. So it is launched it is out there. I think it’s kind of in the soft launch mode, but it’s going well. And now, for our audience members, if you want, if you’re a producer out there and you want to put yourself, you like the idea of this program, that you are notified about opportunities that fit your appetite, that are exclusive to you, that are inbound, organic, high intent, you like all that stuff, and you only want to pay for the ones where you actually help that customer, then Claim-it might be for you.
And it’s now available to you as an individual producer subscription, which obviously is much cheaper and just scaled in size sort of with the producer in mind. So we are making that available. That is out there. We’re very excited about it. We’ve already sold a bunch. I’m sure when the news gets out we’re going to sell a whole bunch more.
And, and it’s just great news. So that’s the announcement we’re making and I’m excited to hear all the feedback about it.
All right, Jen, you got to fix all this because we probably missed a whole bunch of stuff. So, so tell us about the, you know, what comes with what really comes with a producer subscription.
Jen: Yeah, well, I mean, you did a really good job. Justin already talks about Claim-it and really that’s what this is. It’s Claim-it for the producer. So, I mean, it’s very direct. The words say it all. It’s Advantage Producer subscription and it’s really they’re getting Claim-it referrals and just a, I guess. I guess, repeat what Justin said, right?
They’re high intent. They’re exclusive. The agent is setting up exactly what they want to receive for these referrals. They can preview everything that comes in, depending on the settings that they’ve put in place. So appetite settings, right? You choose commercial lines, personal lines, life and annuities.
It’s a wide open set of information, kind of like, you know, knobs and dials that they can turn on and off to get exactly what they want to receive for these Claim-it referrals, and they can kind of preview them and then really they cherry pick what they truly want to purchase. So the subscription itself gives them this ability to view everything that fits their appetite and they receive.
These referrals, these referrals via text notifications. That’s the best way to get them because they’re instantaneous that they’re going to get them on their phone and, you know, see the basics about that referral, be it a commercial lines. They’re going to see, you know, what type of industry the business is in. How long it’s been in business, how big the size, how many employees we’ll ask them the estimated premium. So we’ll give a lot of those details before the agent decides to purchase it. So those fit the, you know, match what that agent wants. They can choose to purchase that referral. It’s really, it’s our Claim-it product, but we’ve scaled it back to just be for the producer. So very much about their own appetite and what they want to buy. Text messages, emails, And then warm transfers that was also mentioned as well. That’s part of this Claim-it producer product as well.
Chip: Can I have a little more of a difference between a warm transfer. So and start with you mentioned I can get a text notification. So, what’s the agent experience? I get a text notification.
Jen: Sure. Yep. Yeah, we really in those text notifications, we highlight the fact that it is a consumer is on the phone. There’s a phone call. There’s someone on the phone waiting for an agent to pick them up. So it is a warm transfer, so they’ll get that text message that says, you know, consumer waiting on the phone.
This consumer matches what you have set up for your appetite, claim them now to basically receive a call. So if that producers pushes “Claim it now” and then goes through, like, the purchase process, then they’ll receive a phone call. And that phone call is because that consumer is already on the phone with our call center. So there’ll be warm transfer directly to the agent that purchased that referral, which I mean, talk about high intent. We’ve already qualified these consumers on the phone. It’s pretty cool that we know it’s going to be a pretty high close ratio at that point.
I think the first couple that we that we did for that, of course, we immediately asked the agent, you know, so the close rate was stupid high. I think we closed like 100% of the first couple that came through, which is expected.
Chip: You mentioned purchase, so I forgot to ask Justin a question. Justin, what do these cost? What do I pay for a, I don’t know, for a pizza shop work comp or something, you know, what’s the typical price range?
Justin: Yeah, so we have these set up on a variable pricing system for both personal lines and commercial line side. The personal line stuff is going to start at $12, which is going to get you, you know, like a boat, a motorcycle, or an RV. And that’s going to range up to somewhere in the $30 range for auto and home or people who are requesting multiple lines of business. On the commercial line side, a similar setup where we’re looking at a number of employees and years in business and industry to kind of right price that. They start at $18 and those are going to range up into the mid to high 30s if it’s, you know, 10 plus years in business and 30, 50, 100 employees.
Chip: Absolutely, and I can tell the audience anyway, we certainly are aware of what vendors charge for those leads that we’ve been saying bad things about. And better ones, there are better ones out there, warm transfers and so forth. And the cost for the quality of these opportunities and the high close rate and everything else is half what the market is, and that’s on purpose, right? This is Trusted Choice. We’re trying to help independent insurance agents to succeed. That’s our fundamental mission. That’s in our charter. And so we’re not trying to make the most money on these. We’re trying to get these…we’re trying to create great consumer experiences and great agency success experiences. We’ve got to pay the bills. So that’s where the pricing model comes from. I know I have asked him. So Jen, can they set a radius? Are my text messages going to blow up at 2 o’clock in the morning? Talk a little bit more about some of the details on that.
Jen: Sure. So, yeah, they, they can fine tune really when they receive these notifications and need from any day of the week that you want them and then time of day weekends. That’s all a setting within the notifications within the agency portal. One other thing, you can set the radius of where the distance from the agency that you want to receive these notifications, right? You just want the referrals that are between 10 to 15 miles away, or do you want them across the state up to 250 miles away or the entire state. You could add on states. If you’re in Wisconsin, like we are, you can go, you can add Illinois, you can you know, go across the country. If you want, if you’re licensed in those states, we can make that’s part of the product as well as to add more states as you want.
And, and I think I also forgot to ask you, Justin, about the growth. I want agents to understand that we have plenty of this and it’s growing all the time. I’ll say a little bit about why it’s growing all the time. We have a lot of insurance company partners. I’m sure everybody’s aware. And other partners as well. And many insurance companies and retail operations end up with opportunities that are inbound to them, but they can’t solve a problem for rights. It’s not their customer. And they’re like they realize that that consumer needs to be or that business owner or whatever needs to be connected to the right independent insurance agent. And we represent a great and efficient way for that insurance company partner to, to hand it off and say, you know what we can’t help you with your insurance need, but you could use and certainly in today’s marketplace where things are tightening up in terms of appetite and capacity everywhere, that’s increasingly happening. And so a lot of stuff comes to us through API. It is brand new. It is seconds old since it might have been at one of our insurance company partners and, and it comes in, but Justin share a little bit about the numbers. How much, how much growth have we seen in the in the supply of these amazing opportunities in the last year?
Justin: Yeah, we’ve seen a lot of great growth. July of 23, the total referral volume was 434% over July of 2022. So tremendous growth over the past 12 months.
Chip: It’s crazy. And I, I don’t see any end in the growth. At that slope, I think we got another year of 400 plus percent plus growth. This is our way of saying to all the agents out there, please, we have great opportunities. We have great customers that are looking for the right agent. And we think Claim-it is the way to get it delivered to you when you can work on it in the most efficient and most economical way.
So that’s our announcement. I think we’ll probably we could talk about this all day. But that’s our announcement. It’s going great. We would love to have more producers on the platform for that reason. We are opening this up to any producer that can have an individual subscription to Claim-it on their own. Their agency doesn’t have to sign up for the full subscription and we’re off to the races.
I know we do have also we mentioned success stories. And I want to make sure that the audience has a chance to hear not just from us because we’re obviously a little biased about it, but I want to hear them hear what actual agents are saying about Claim-it. And so we’re actually going to insert right in here into the podcast, a couple of those clips, and I’m going to run that right now.
Greg Hagenston, Montana:
The people are waiting for you to call them. I mean, I’ve never had that happen with a lead. It’s like the Uber of insurance agencies. And so when you’ve got an agent available and a lead that pops up, they’ll take it. It’s the best, absolutely the best lead program there is, bar none. They pay for themselves.
Scott Eidman, New York:
The hit ratio is easily one out of two, one out of three leads. The people are truly interested and Generally happy that I called them so fast.
Sharon Hairston, Texas:
You’re making more than you’re spending. And the best part, these are actually quality leads. I have had to hire some more staff, uh, to accommodate the incoming new business.
Mitch Dennis, Georgia:
You’ve got to watch your, your dollars with advertising. Some of it does absolutely nothing. This absolutely produces sales. It puts, puts money back in your pocket. It’s something that definitely is working for our agency. It’s been a great return on investment. No doubt about that.
All right, I hope you enjoyed those clips. I think they say it all. I, we record a new one, at least one, every single week. We watch them all as a company, and I love to hear what they say, and we glean lots of little interests and, and feedback and insights. into our product and how it’s going and what the agents are getting out of it. So I hope you enjoyed those as well.
Well, we probably should wrap this up. This was fun. Jen, Justin, did you have some fun? We probably got to go back to our regular jobs though, right?
Jen: Lots to do.
Justin: Yep. Yeah. This is great. Thank you.
Chip: If you are a producer out there looking to grow your book, please check out the new Advantage Producer Claim-it Program at TrustedChoice.com/Producer. I want to thank Jen Frey, Vice President of Product, and Justin Biggs, Vice President of Distribution, my guests today, for joining us to share this great news with the IA Channel.
And as always, I want to remind everyone listening, take a few minutes out of each week and look around. We are living in the golden age of insurance innovation. Soak it up, enjoy it. I know I am. I want to thank the folks that make this program possible, including Central Insurance and Encova, Main Street America, Safeco, Selective, State Auto, Travelers, Westfield, and of course, the Big I.
And one more reminder to check out your agency profile or your IA company profile on TrustedChoice.com. Your digital footprint matters now more than ever.
Thank you, everyone. This has been the IA Advantage and I am Chip Bacciocco signing off. Have a safe and prosperous week, everyone.
