Tapping into a seam of new business is exciting. As part of the sales process, your rainmakers have promised excellent account services. Your operations group wants to deliver. They may need to gear up to absorb the incremental business.
But how exactly? Add more staff, add accounts to existing staff? Executing on the promise of excellent account management keeps operations managers up at night. I consistently hear that scaling business and staff burnout are operations’ two main concerns.
- Scaling throughput
Scaling operations means increasing throughput while keeping operating costs low. This is different from growth where increased throughput corresponds with an increase in costs. Hiring more operations supports growth. Investing in IT may offset hiring people. But scaling demands a creative twist to gain exponential increases in efficiency. - Staff Burnout
Absent gains in efficiency, existing operations staff will be asked to work harder. The joy of new business on the rainmaking side becomes a burden on the operations side. Some of the most high value work account managers perform is buried under an avalanche of pure processing. And don’t you know it, the high value work turns out to be the most rewarding.
More process work + less rewarding work = burnout
Scale and burnout are pretty obvious. Most brokers deal with these at some point. However, I find the brokerages that expand year over year are also relentless in finding ways to outcompete. What’s different are their dual goals of scaling while constantly improving deliverables to their clients!
Now this really demands a creative twist. How do you increase efficiency, keep costs low, handle growing work volume, keep staff happy AND improve service?
One answer is to off-load time consuming, onerous tasks to technology enabled services (TES) companies. TES suppliers deliver service by using proprietary technology otherwise unavailable to the broker. Basically, TES allows brokerages to free up their staff to handle more business and deliver an improved result.
TES benefits for brokers include:
- On demand service, as necessary
- Better, faster and less expensive product/solution than doing it yourself
- Limiting disruptions to operations
- Automating manual tasks
Truly scaling broker operations demands creativity. Gaining efficiency and quality advantages while reducing staff burnout can be achieved by automating manual processes. TES companies like Griptiller help you scale and compete with better client service.
