TECHNOLOGY

Senior moment

Work At Home Vintage Employees provides skilled, U.S.-based insurance retirees to agencies, wholesalers, and carriers

By Nancy Doucette

The average age of an insur­ance industry professional is 56, according to a 2010 study published by the National Alliance Research Academy. That means that many of those people who are over the average will be retir­ing soon. In fact, over the next 20 years, some 1.3 million people are expected to retire from the insurance industry. That comes out to about 65,000 people a year exiting the business.

The study goes on to note that 59% of insurance professionals currently in the workforce plan on working on a part-time basis following retirement and, if possible, they would like to do that work from home. The survey also polled retired industry professionals. Of that group, 74% were interested in continuing their insurance careers from home.

Sharon Emek, Ph.D., CIC, a 25-year veteran of the insurance industry and currently a partner at CBS Coverage Group, based in New York, heard those statistics and decided she needed to do something to stem the tide of talent that would be exiting the insurance industry. "These people are CICs, CPCUs, and ARMs with decades of experience!" she exclaims. She decided to serve as a matchmaker of sorts to bring together skilled insurance retirees with agencies, brokerages or carriers in need of full-time or part-time help with back-office or customer service tasks.

Her solution is WAHVE—Work At Home Vintage Employees, LLC. Her goal? To assemble the insurance industry's largest database of retiring baby boomer talent. As of late March 2011, Emek says she has some 500 WAHVE applicants. "Most of our people are between 58 and 65 years old," she points out. "A large portion of our workers retire well before they're eligible for Social Security because they want more balance in their lives."

The vetting process

First off, if you're under 55, you're not eligible. "WAHVE is interested in retirees, not a work-at-home mom," Emek states. "If you're retired, there are no kids in the house, you're totally dedicated, and you're experienced, we invite you to complete the preliminary application at our Web site."

That begins what Emek describes as a "rigorous qualifying process. It takes us about two months to qualify a WAHVE," she says.

In a greatly condensed version of the process, the prospective wahve is interviewed by phone; the individual's credentials—licenses, designations, employers, references, language proficiencies—are checked and cross-checked. Insurance skills, E&O understanding, and agency management system competency tests are administered. A background check is conducted.

"We've built our own technology for the qualification process," Emek explains. "It's all Web based. It allows us to search the skill sets, make matches with employer organizations, and manage the whole process once someone becomes a wahve or an organization becomes a client.

"When we give an agency, MGA or carrier a wahve's résumé for consideration, that organization can be confident that the individual has done the work they say they've done, they know insurance, they have the credentials and the personality to be a remote worker," Emek declares.

Help wanted

Like prospective wahves, organizations seeking full-time or part-time help, or help with a specific project, can sign up using the WAHVE Web site. That process isn't as lengthy as the wahve vetting process. Organizations that sign up are offered a free analysis of the cost savings that can be realized by outsourcing to a wahve. "Any agency—large or small—is an ideal client for WAHVE," Emek notes. "Any agency with a backlog of work could benefit from hiring a wahve.

"We want to help agencies get away from being process-focused so they can be client-focused," she continues. "Additionally, there are cost benefits to hiring a wahve. They don't require office space or benefits, and because they're handling the back-office tasks, the more highly paid staff is available for more client or prospect contact which increases retention, new business, revenues, and margins."

Emek says WAHVE discusses with the client organization what processes it wishes to outsource, the management system it uses, and how many wahves the organization may need. Based on those factors, WAHVE then provides the organization with résumés of suitable wahves. "All an organization has to teach a wahve is its workflow," she says.

WAHVE will work with an organization's IT department to set up remote access to that organization's system for the wahve it hires. "Data never leaves your system," Emek points out. "Wahves connect remotely to an agency's management system in a secure environment. The agency determines the level of access a wahve has. No one here at WAHVE has access to the client information."

She says the entire set-up and training process typically takes no more than three to five days.

Bye-bye service center

Emek points out that many agencies using carrier service centers do so because they couldn't find talent to do that process work, or it was costing them too much to do it internally. "Agencies give up a percentage of commission in order to use the service center," she observes. "Some agencies are realizing that they can use a wahve and not have to give up the commission. The wahve will do a better job because they're more experienced than the carrier's service center staff.

"The agency can bring those policies that were being handled by the service center back to the agency," she continues. "The person handling those policies will be that agency's own dedicated person…it will be better service for the client. It puts the client back with the agency, where it belongs, rather than with the carrier."

That's exactly what's happening at Texas-based InsureZone AgentSecure. Velma Ibarra is customer service manager for the organization which serves as a wholesaler to hundreds of agents in the United States who don't have access to national carriers. She says InsureZone began exploring the idea of hiring a wahve when the organization decided to stop using the service center of their largest carrier. She says they hired Christi Johnson, a Tucson, Arizona, resident in October 2010. Johnson, who started her insurance career in 1967, has both agency and carrier experience; she was well-versed on Sagitta, the agency's management system, and was familiar with the Web sites for many of the carriers that InsureZone uses. It took less than a day before she was "ready to go," Ibarra recalls.

While InsureZone was finalizing its withdrawal from the carrier service center, Johnson was tasked with handling all the daily downloads. Ibarra explains that Johnson goes to the carrier Web sites and pulls down everything that was processed by the carriers the day before. "The downloads must be handled in a timely fashion," Ibarra says. "Cancellation notices are included in those downloads. There could be 60 to 70 items a day from just one carrier. Having Christi handling these frees up the rest of us so we can be on the phones with agents."

Ibarra says Johnson's experience is a plus. "On Christi's third or fourth day on the job, she was processing an endorsement and noticed that the carrier hadn't completed the change, so she called that to my attention. It's great to have a seasoned person who knows what to look for. She's not just pushing paper; she's making sure the carrier did what it was supposed to do. That makes my job easier. I don't have to double check her."

And since InsureZone has severed its ties to the carrier service center, Johnson is now handling all those change requests. "We need to have a dedicated person to process this carrier's endorsements all day long," Ibarra says. "Now we're getting the commission that we had been ceding to the carrier for using their service center. Our turnaround time in processing the change request is better than the service center's. If we get a change request for that carrier, it goes to Christi, and it's done."

Perfect match

Sue Prince, CIC, PIWT, confesses that when her job with Aon moved from her hometown of Fort Worth 30 miles away to Dallas, she spent more time commuting than she cared to. So she quit. After about 18 months, she decided retirement didn't suit her. A friend told her about WAHVE. She aced all the qualification tests, and in short order she was working on international accounts in the large commercial unit at Foa & Son, headquartered in New York City.

Kathy Karanzias, assistant commercial lines manager for Foa & Son, points out that having a document management system is essential to the success of Foa's arrangement with Prince. "Everything is scanned into the system," she says. "With the remote access to the system, Sue can find what she needs."

Prince details the tasks she handles for Foa & Son: "I do everything I used to do when I was in an office…the only thing I don't do now is call on clients. I check policies, certificates, and binders. I do all the processing work. I order endorsements and handle suspense. I prepare applications and forward them to the carrier to get quotes. I do spreadsheets and schedules of insurance. I do premium allocations. And I do follow-up if a premium hasn't been paid.

"If I were a 25-year old processor, I wouldn't understand a lot of what I'm being asked to do," Prince maintains.

And that's precisely what makes WAHVE so valuable to the industry, Emek notes in a recent blog post which she titled "A Senior Moment." In the post she points out that "someone more seasoned can:

• Point out an experience or lesson from the past that applies now, years or even decades later.

• Understand the historical development of a business or organization to help it remain true to its brand.

• Teach another person a correct way to perform a task (make a sale, log a transaction, etc.) and steer that person away from the less-efficient ways to do it.

"Anyone who knows me," Emek continues, "realizes that I'm constantly saying that only people over age 80 are senior citizens. Many people at and past the traditional retirement threshold of age 55 no longer consider themselves 'senior citizens.' In fact, they're one of the biggest segments of the population. It's time we looked to them for productive 'senior moments.'" n

For more information:

Work At Home Vintage Employees, LLC

Web site: www.wahve.com