When you’re ready to get out of the weeds of your employee benefits agency and spend more time selling, it’s time to create a Director of Client Experience role and share leadership responsibilities.
Promote your natural service team leader, giving them ownership of how your agency serves its clients. As the client experience leader, they are responsible for leading the effort to design the client experience, establish processes to deliver it, and develop the people who carry it out. This new role takes workload off the owner, allows the service team to become significant contributors to agency growth, and gives your strongest team lead another career move within your agency.
I wrote about how to make your service team part of your agency’s growth strategy, and this step puts a leadership and accountability structure around those ideas.
Why so much of the agency still runs through the owner
Most agency systems were built piecemeal, based on what the owner prioritized and whoever was able to make it happen. The way a client gets served is often like a secret club: it varies from client to client, and only the producer and account manager responsible for the account know what’s been promised.
When knowledge isn’t stored in a central, accessible way, the questions, exceptions, and training all find their way back to the owner, who is often the lead or only producer, leaving them with the burden of holding the whole operation together.
This can work until the agency wants to grow. Once the book reaches a certain size, the owner can’t personally make sure every promise to every client is kept, at least not efficiently.
What a Director of Client Experience owns
Creates the architecture for how you serve clients, from onboarding through renewal.
They define what that experience should look like, document it, and lead the changes required to deliver it consistently every time.
Leads the agency service processes and procedures.
Processes belong to the company, so this leader ensures they’re documented clearly enough that anyone on the team, including someone hired last month, can pick up an account and serve it well, and supports them in doing it.
The process documentation also enables the agency to systematically introduce AI into its operations, increase efficiency, and free people up to do more strategic work. AI can’t run on processes that live in someone’s head.
Develops the next layer of talent.
They set the standards for how the service team works together and with producers, lead the team meetings, coach account managers through their own growth, and build a bench that lets you promote from within when a senior seat opens.
How owners share leadership responsibility
Handing over this kind of authority is usually the hardest part for owners, because it means letting someone else decide how things get done. As the owner, you keep the agency’s vision and purpose, your relationships with your most important clients, and accountability for results.
Your Director of Client Experience makes the day-to-day decisions about how service runs, including process changes, escalations, and training new team members. They also take on the critical role of building a cohesive working relationship with the sales team.
Agree on three to five outcomes the role is responsible for, and review the results in regular coaching conversations where you talk through what’s working, what’s slipping, and red flags either of you can see coming.
Setting your team leader up for success
The right person is often already on your team, and the increased authority and responsibility require a commitment from the agency and the person to make the shift work. Show that commitment by investing in the training and support they need to grow into the role.
- Select the right person. Look for the account manager or executive who understands client businesses, leads others through implementation, and has earned the trust of their peers, producers, and clients.
- Reduce their workload. Take the transactional work off their desk so they have room to lead.
- Commit time and budget. Block time and fund training programs, coaching, or peer groups to help them develop in the new role.
- Write the job description together. Start with how the role contributes to the agency’s purpose and spell out the responsibilities, authority, and skills you want them to build.
Making this organizational change opens an account management career path. In many agencies, the only opportunities for advancement require a shift to production. Offering a path through levels of account management gives people best suited to service a reason to build their careers with you.
Goose peer accountability for operations leaders
Through training courses and peer accountability groups in our Goose community, we are working with agency operations leaders to design and document the systems that run their agency’s service operations. They’re working on the client experience, processes and procedures, and team development alongside peers doing the same work. Our goal is for each participant to look at the way their agency serves its clients and say they designed it.
Before you make this shift, decide whether you’re ready for it. If you’re not able to make changes to free up your leader’s time and invest in their development, wait until you are. When you are ready, and you’d like your team lead to have this type of development and support alongside other operations leaders, reach out to us for a conversation to see if it’s the right fit.
Frequently asked questions
How does an insurance agency owner free themselves up for more time to sell?
Pass some of the ownership responsibilities to a team leader to manage operations from client onboarding through renewal. Give them the authority to lead the client experience, processes, and the people behind it so anyone on the team can deliver consistently. The owner holds regular coaching conversations with the team lead instead of managing the entire service operation, and can put that time and effort into selling.
What does a client experience leader do in an employee benefits agency?
A client experience leader takes ownership of how the agency serves its clients, so the owner isn’t the bottleneck for every service decision. That person designs the client experience, owns service processes and procedures, and develops the account management team. The owner keeps the vision, key client relationships, and accountability for results.
Is there a career path in account management besides moving into production?
There can be when an agency builds one. A path through levels of account management, leading up to a role that owns the client experience, gives people best suited to service a reason to grow their careers with the agency. It also lets the agency promote from within when a senior service seat opens.