Empower Your Insurance Industry with Cms Contact Management System for Insurance Industry

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nice cool man well anyways nick yeah just back jumping back to where i was uh how's everything going is everything you know i know you said it's a fast pace with better and then you know is it but you like that you said i do i i i i think if i feel like things can always go faster um that's just the world of technology uh i guess what i'm learning is things never go as fast as you want them to go yeah i think everybody just thinks you can push an easy button and things just appear or it's like baking a cake uh it just doesn't work that way there's a lot of moving parts when it comes to making something and so i sometimes i wish i can go faster but i also think that we're moving fast we're doing a lot and we're growing our team and uh we are iterating we're trying to implement as much uh feedback and you know everything with and trying to find that right balance i mean everybody can have a million to one ideas but it's trying to find like okay what's going to serve the majority what's going to help like how do you make this not confusing or how do you make this yeah serves more people it'd be great to put all the buttons and widgets and everything that everybody wanted but then you wouldn't have very good looking or very easy to use software so trying to find that that healthy balance yeah that's our product team uh and then my job is simply to uh talk about it and to market it and to uh you know kind of put it out there so um what do you what was like what's the ultimate goal like of better like i know obviously it's just trying to like easy links and like these other kind of systems are a little bit behind on like innovation like and i see what you guys are trying to do but like what's the ultimate goal like are you just trying to make like the best management system that exists possible for like insurance agents is that i'm just guessing i don't know yeah so i i think that for us we want to we want to go back to how we think about uh agent technology number one we want to put the independent agent first and everything that we should sure sure so we want to create uh tools and we want to create uh solutions that that empower agents number one yeah i think where we differentiate ourselves and our philosophy from some of the other companies is i think up until this point everybody is thought as agency management system or crm yeah all of it like as one thing like we we are a crm we are an agency management system and they play in that that category and so it's this very narrow path of how do we become the best ams how do we become the best crm i think for us the way we think about it is um we don't see those things as as destinations we see we see those things as components so instead of being a crm or an ems or any type of technology we think about how do we make those those things the best that they can be but make those things features of the actual thing and absolutely and for us we we and that's why we always talk about agency success and what does agency success mean and when it comes to technology we think that agency success is one platform right in one browser where everything has like everything is housed together yeah and so like i mean i i've been i've been selling insurance now where i was selling insurance from 05 to 2020. and i got my start uh i got my start on the you know i spent some time in the captive world and in the captive world you have a lot and captive agents will talk about this a lot like the systems while they may be outdated at least it's like one thing like i'm in one thing so one thing may not be very good but i'm in one thing for the most part which company was it that you were with nick um i spent time both with triple a in northern california gotcha and then i did a very brief stint in allstate before launching the independent going independent into 2012. and but that they might talk about the bad technology but at least i'm in one one ecosystem and so that's kind of how we think about it not the bad technology part we want to create one ecosystem for independent agents right and where there'll be lots of things that always come into play that we just won't ever do and the example i always give is uh we're really good friends with the folks over at glovebox okay we're never going to make a mobile app we're never going to create a um we're never going to do what they're doing sure so on the things like that where it makes sense let's let's build deep integrations with those companies uh so that people can still operate in one ecosystem even with the integration and so that's kind of how we think about it overall one platform in one browser for agency success totally man totally i feel like there's a lot even i'm sure you guys get a bunch of feedback from agents but like just off the top of my head like the most basic thing i can even think of that i don't i have to manually do an excel and luckily i studied this in college like i know what i'm doing as far as like data analysis but i don't even have like a graph of like where my book is and like i will just like basic things where i would like to see like the pulse of my business and my agency and like cancellations and all these things like they exist but they're just so choppy and they look kind of funky like i think from what i've seen from you guys it seems like you guys are headed in the right direction um which is cool um what are like some of the cool features that you feel like are that you think are kind of better and like better yeah well i think the the the the biggest feature is kind of goes back to making policy downloads okay do something and so we get policy downloads from all from all the carriers that download and so traditionally that information has just stayed in your digital filing cabinet yep it's good to look up and it's it's a resource and that's all good uh but historically that data hasn't been easy to leverage or to integrate or to create offense offensive strategies around so for us i think the big thing is taking down loads from ivan's or al3 files if your if your carrier does that and to automate whether it is uh onboarding uh uh you know renewal information claims i think claims to me to me that's the biggest one that's my personal favorite is okay yeah yeah because that means it gets downloaded as a claim and then where does it like what do you what can you do with it what would you like send it in like an email campaign or like email and test uh text and task follow-up so you know that you know this just as well as i do not everybody calls your agency when they have a claim a lot of people call the carrier direct and you have no idea if the claim ever happened or not until you're sitting with a marketing rep from that company and they go here's your loss ratio here the claims that you know here's and you're like holy smokes where did this 200 000 claim come from on on water loss right not everybody calls you and so being able to insert yourself into the claims process not as an adjuster but as a point of contact as a empathetic touch to you know make sure you can answer questions i think to me is is big i also think the renewal aspect is big so when renewals come in being able to move it ingly especially in a state like california where i know you're at where rates can kind of be all over the place they're never going down they're always going up but you know being able to segment that properly to say okay we want to create sops and workflows based on this percentages increase maybe we reshop them maybe we don't that's subjective to the agency but being able to at least communicate in a certain way based on their goals yeah yeah gotcha nah that's great stuff man yeah that's awesome i feel like that would definitely do do you see it being in like uh you know across the border is there like certain packages that you have to go for like the elite package or like the middle package or like local package do you get that yeah no that's just with the uh the ams feature which is a flat which is a flat cost so uh you can do it in the crm but it's more manual you gotta move stuff around whereas in the ams it's like telepathy it just moves it for you what about the companies that don't download that's the stuff that like drives me kind of nuts um yeah what do you i mean what is it what can we do we can't really do anything about it can we or yes and no so the companies that do download great um but a lot of companies they'll have uh you'll have the ability to get al3 files uh from the company like they email it to you or something or yeah so you can create stuff with the company we have one company uh in the midwest and east coast that is notorious for this i don't know if we can name drop carriers as much but um we have a company that is very popular in the ia channel and but they don't download and when i say popular i mean if you're on them you're basically captive with them okay and they don't integrate well with anybody and but they do a l3 file so you can get all three files and then we create a way to just man to just upload that like a csv gotcha um i mean you just got to be on top of it though right you got to just down you got to be on top of it you got to be on top of it and we wish that i was i always tell agents in that part of the country stop riding with that carrier like just you know figure out a company that's you know beyond the 1995 mark um hey totally man i just like i can't sometimes i can't believe like that's why i'm stoked to talk to you and like stoke just see what you guys are doing and you know it just with the amount of that that's just by i feel like it's just so behind i can't almost like wrap my head around i'm like how is this massive industry with all these people you know big carriers making loads of money uh well that's it no why can't they innovate you named it you just you just said it right and so i always tell people like i worked for triple a and triple a was started in 1908 and when i left there i felt like the same people were still in charge and you you mentioned it these companies that are making a ton of money so you you go to the executive you go to the product people you go to the people who make these executive calls yeah they're making three four or five hundred thousand dollars a year in their own salary you're going to go and tell them that they're doing something wrong they don't care like what are you going to tell them right so i think i think that's part of it even if they just saw i i don't like i just my gut feelings i don't know what the real data would show here but like if people were armed with the right information and data for retention purposes for growth purposes at the end of the day i almost feel like it would benefit them their salaries would probably even go up yeah but you also these are a lot of these people uh these people are different than you and me and people watching this video you know you started your agency you have skin in the game it matters to you yeah you're right there's some there's something there right that is a part of you that if it wasn't there you would long for it right these people these positions they're hired hands though they don't care you know it's not they they don't care they're if if it doesn't work at company a they'll easily land in a soft cushy c-suite executive role in company b so skin in the game is not is not there so they don't they're not as empathetic yeah yeah no it makes sense hey nick i have a um this is more of like a selfish question that i'm just curious um do you guys see any potential of like doing stuff that has to tie or in the in the near future or have you guys even like talked to i'm sure it's probably come up with like blockchain technology possibly being implemented into um you know platforms that you guys are using or any other potential platforms that you guys might buy or do something with yeah so here's what i'll say on that stuff i'm a okay i have no clue how any of that stuff works i mean you might as well be talking to my grandpa right now when it comes to that when people talk about nfts and blockchain i'm like this is what i felt like when i had to explain an hdmi cable to my grandma like i have no idea like i have no clue so but with that being said there are people on our team who are really into that stuff yeah and they nerd out on it and they talk about it and they go it'd be cool to create some and i'm i i don't even want to butcher the the the verbiage like the stuff that they talk about i'm like no idea like you might as well be speaking mandarin to me right now but they talk about doing this stuff so i definitely think and that's the uh benefit or the curse however you define it of having really smart uh people on your team who do the ones and zeros and design the product and that's their world i look at it so i think it's something that i would say i wouldn't i wouldn't i'm gonna i wouldn't put it past our team to to to do or to think about yeah they felt but again it goes back to differentiating between what problems can we solve and what's just cool things to do because the two are not always the same right sometimes i see a lot of people involved with stuff and they do stuff and i'm like well that's really cool right but what problem is that really solving right now today and so i i'd much rather get i'd much rather get the industry off a fax machine before we start talking about that's crypto and blockchain that's it people let's get people on uh google chrome first that's a good start man that's a good start i think you guys are yeah for sure i i like when i first started i started back in 2018. it blew my mind i was just like i was looking up like where is the best system and i just couldn't couldn't believe that even looking at some of their just platforms i was like dude come on uh i i joke so uh if you follow me around on social media sometimes i've been known to kind of throw sucker punches or left hand you know left crosses across across the legacy technology uh bows a little bit and so um i jokingly say i think a lot of these companies a lot of these companies their technology is older than windows 95 you think so yes like straight up like yes if you you don't have to do a whole lot of homework to be able to go back and say when was this company started um prior to in carta and windows 95 and then it's the exact same stuff today and so yeah where do you change where do you where do you see better like going like disrupting the like the marketplace like what do you think is gonna what do you see in like the next five ten ten years like what do you think is going to happen as far as the industry or better agencies roll in like better better agency like do you think it's gonna disrupt everybody and it's gonna just because i mean i don't see very many other people doing it yeah so i i think if i had to guess today and put money on the blackjack table i would say that i would i would bet that uh better agency is kind of uh thinking as far as i think about the first step is kind of thinking about this kind of stuff and i imagine that there'll be other companies that follow suit and i imagine that our goal and to us we consider that a win i mean if we if we could displace a lot of the legacy technology and as and we just are very candid and honest about something really fast a lot of people that use a lot of that technology like there's ams in particular uh that with the average age of the people who use it is like 60 years old is it really they're large they're large right and so i don't see newer agents coming in and and feeling enough of that vacuum so i think time will tell but i think the agency's going to have a place where it kind of becomes and this is what we fight for uh we want to be that category leader that's affecting change but if we can also if other companies come alongside or pop up and say yeah we also have the same idea this is also how we think we think like this point of view is what we think we're gonna have a different product but our point of view is the same kind of then i honestly think that that's a win and uh it doesn't bother us at all uh when startups because we're start we're still starting we've only been around since 19. and the um i i think that will continue to affect change and i think that we'll continue to uh our hope is to lead this category of agency success and what agency success means and to evangelize that point of view and so i think that there'll be other companies that that also get raised up in that and uh see that see that the same way maybe have a different spin on it but offer a different solution i think our goal what we'd love to see is less fragmentation ultimately uh we'd love to see a lot less single point solutions or what we consider single point solutions like there's a solution that just does this one thing and that's all we do okay and it'd be great if all those single point solutions had more of a streamlined process but they don't and they don't work you know it's just it's not efficient but uh less of that and more of um you know unification i think is great what was the uh the inspiration behind the uh the fanny pack i started wearing a fanny pack years ago so i when i first had kids yeah um i found that we would go to disneyland quite a bit and uh live in california and i felt i would always be like the like a fanny pack is a must have at disneyland and like it's so like it's just true so there's so much futility in it like i don't have to have a backpack i got a lug around i could just have like what i need right there the fanny pack and it kind of created the life of its own where people would see me in photos and they'd comment on it so i turned it into a joke as well and i just started wearing it like kind of to keep up with uh the gimmick a little bit uh around and i didn't mind i liked it and because i have like a bulky phone and keys and wallet i'm like i don't want to put that on my so so i do that and then it just became like it's almost like uh hulk hogan's you know yellow shirt that he rips like it just became part of the costume and so uh then with better agency we're like let's do better agency fanny packs uh because i would take a photo like this i would take a photo i posted online and people would be like where's the fanny pack and it just became this joke that just kept going kept points i'm like well we gotta we gotta do a better better agency fanny pack so i saw that not as sexy as i think uh most people thought of but uh that's that's the truth of it that's hilarious yeah i saw the i saw the pool fanny pack edition so i didn't know where that like came from it just popped up my feed and i was like oh my god it's good marketing man like you're doing a good job you people remember i remember there's a funny story behind that ad uh so uh my partner uh who acts as our ceo he uh he posted that ad and he and i don't always see eye to eye on uh okay like marketing tactics okay and um so i posted it as an experiment and he saw that the data released and he's like bro you've got to take we were doing we were in denver doing a podcast yeah live he's like bro you have to take that down yeah i go bro let's just give it 24 hours let's give it 24 hours and see what it does yeah i got him to and you know i agreed and he he hesitantly was like okay he's panicking right because he's you know and uh that ad to this day has been our best before like we get so many people that see that ad and i'm sure there's a lot of people that get offended by i don't like it whatever that's much sure but there's so many more people that are like wanna you know schedule demos and i'm like this it works you know like you got to be you have to use it sparingly it's like putting salt or hot sauce on something like you can't go overboard with it but uh yeah that's the story behind that because if that's if that's the number one like face of the like the you can't i mean like you said it you throw it in there here and there well and here's what i and i think this is a good lesson too for anybody in any vertical like when you are starting out like we did in 2019 and you know i think that ad release actually released last year but when we when you first start out and you're playing from behind to start right you've got all these companies that have 30 40 years of uh track record right but better and different they're established they got skyscrapers in major cities like you have to come out and you've got to throw some paint makers like that's just my like you've gotta if you're punching up a couple weight classes you better do something to um stand out a little bit and so you gotta make them remember your name a little bit uh i'm talking about like the legacy players and so you had to you have to sometimes do things that can be thought of as a little maybe provocative or it's all subjective comedic however you want to think about it and um but i tell our team all the time like there's going to come a point where that teeter-totter will we'll tip a little bit and you'll go from a little less like that and you'll you'll you'll you'll find you'll plot a little you'll find kind of that happy medium between your brand which if our brand is gonna be fun and kind of out there a little bit like it doesn't it's not always gonna be that it might be something different but it's still you know we're going to kind of mellow it out a little bit but you got to punch up a few weight classes and and shake the tree a little bit if you're going to if you're going to start out yeah yeah totally i think you've done a good job with that i've uh i mean you've got my attention i've i've seen it i've heard it's better and different it got someone's attention yeah you guys are buzzing in the uh in the space so i think you're doing a good job um nick if you wanted to like point people toward like to go and get uh you know schedule with a demo or like to figure it out where would you where would they do that you go to it's very simple to get a demo to learn more about it you can uh talk to one of our account executives you can see our product demo all that good stuff um before you jump on a call uh you can see pricing all all you see testimonials you go to betteragency.io we're very transparent on all that stuff to see exactly what everything costs you can see what other people are saying about it betteragency.io there's a button there to say this discovery call click on that button and uh you can you can connect with anybody on our team cool man well thank you nick i appreciate it i want to also be respectful of your time i know we only had 30 minutes here so um yeah man i appreciate it we'll uh we'll get this out to on my channel and hopefully um you know people get some value from it i think um you know as the way you know it continues to develop i think like i said you guys are one of the only people doing it and you know you guys are first in line you guys are right there and on top of it seems like you guys are doing good stuff and um so you do you guys take feedback like from agents right now are you guys like hearing like we do so uh kind of going into our philosophy you can't take everybody's feedback right you have to weigh feedback and you have to validate feedback right um someone might say hey i do uh insurance for underwater basket weavers i need this feature well that's great but you know we can't affect we can't change that forever and so you have to prioritize feedback and you do that by validation and uh importance so yes and that's that's how we think about it so we have a product team that is actively listening to you know with their with their thumb on the pulse what what people are saying what they're wanting and kind of trying to categorize that and prioritize it so that we can see what makes the most amount of sense nick one more question for you um and also i want to give you like one piece of feedback for me that that's something i really like that um maybe you guys can implement how hard is it to get if you're already with someone like another management system to get over moved over is it difficult is it pretty easy what's that transition like the answer is it depends uh you'll see i talk a lot about and the reason why these rants come out as much as they do is i talk a lot about like on our channel about agency data the the problem that we find is that everybody that we that we deal with from an exit file standpoint or agency data it's all messed up like nobody's had good data nobody and that's not necessarily the fault of the agency i think there's some best practices that agents aren't haven't been aware of that they should start doing but the way that ams databases are structured without getting too nerdy it just is a it's a cluster for everybody and so yeah um there have been some cases where it's been breezy easy and there have been some cases where it's like wow you've got 500 john does all with five five five one two one two and mickey mouse at aol.com as the contact information like we gotta do a ton of work on that and so there's uh we've we've begun implementing processes to where we're just going to start and two ams companies don't play nice and so when you go to a particular animal breed uh mascot ams that they just give you some dirty dirty data well dirty or they'll tell you we'll get you your data in 12 to 20 weeks and oh by the way it's five thousand dollars away yeah it's very common and so that that's their that's their way of saying you're stuck so we say that's bs so we're going to do different things in order to make that easier for you um and so that's the stuff that we do now uh and that network continuously iterating is how do we get the data in a way that's quick that points to the north star of the carriers it's clean and i wish we could push a button and make that all happen within 24 hours but yeah it's a process so the more data you have the more likely that it's messed up and we have a lot of agents that will say i don't want to move because i know my data is wrong but i'm like so you're going to stay on the platform you're at with the knowing you have bad data like that doesn't make sense to me um sure it's just going to go yeah it's uh it could be easy it could be tricky it could take a week it could take a month it could take six months we've have we have some customers where it's taken a while because like frankly they'll have five thousand ten thousand records and man it's it's it's sorting through a lot of stuff not everybody's that way though so i i try to be very upfront with that we try to be upfront and we learn more along the way too so when we're talking to people and they're like hey this is my situation we know now based on experience saying okay this is kind of what we think and we can give more accurate estimations and and try to you know hold to those those times yeah nick just wanted to give you like my feedback of the one feature that i like with my crm um i i don't know if you guys are doing this but if you guys are that'd be really cool um i really like like the birthday cards like the welcome actual physical mail cards i know this is like i'm talking all about like innovating and improving and stuff but like that's kind of like outdated sending out like actual physical stuff that looks like you wrote it um those are super cool i feel like those like personal touches like i'm willing to pay extra for that um every single month so people get that i don't know are you guys doing that or yeah so there there's 101 companies that do those cards and they integrate pretty easily so so we have a pretty again talk about differentiator we have a pretty robust zapier integration where you could pass anything out of zapier and receive it in so we can easily uh set up you know setups apps for that another thing that we set up is we thought was a cool touch so this is an idea for you i mean the same thing with your crm is we started uh we created a workflow where you can uh automate gift delivery to customers via amazon think about think about this touch if someone's coming up for renewal instead of like them about their renewal why don't you just send them if they're homeowners send them uh two nine volt batteries for their smoke detector uh a month before renewal uh from you just it just hey it's in this stage send out uh you know if this and that their homeowners send it to their their mailing address or anything right i think i like the the nineveh batteries from smoke detectors or cars genius no it's genius just a cool little touch right so you can do a card you could do a little gift it's 9 volts cost you i don't know what the cost now but you know they cost you you know 10 bucks yep uh to send to just automate that gift and it just goes out and uh so that's a cool thing that you can do as well yeah that's great stuff no i'll definitely keep that in mind especially with like the big clients that's that's really important stuff yeah so yeah and if it increases your retention by even or at scale by a quarter of a point yeah at scale that's that's that's not bad yeah totally well thanks nick i appreciate it man i'll let you go i don't want to keep you tied up here too long so um thank you and i appreciate you letting me also get this on the channel so hopefully some people check out better um a dot io is that right better agency no better agency dot io okay cool man yeah well i appreciate it nick um keep it up keep uh you know innovating and hopefully um we'll see you guys at the top with the uh you know the management system game so um appreciate it dude no worries thank you so much awesome no worries all right thanks nick bye we'll see ya bye