Chicagoland SIA Blog

At its core, success is the favorable accomplishment of an aim or a purpose. To know if your agency is a success, you must first identify the aim(s) or purpose(s) of your agency and create meaningful, measurable goals towards that end.

Do you have a process for onboarding new clients?

Has anyone ever asked for five minutes of your time? What is five minutes of your time even worth? If a client, employee, friend or significant other asked for five minutes of your time—do you have it to give? Or are you simply too wrapped up in your day and the tasks you need to accomplish to slow things down and make time for other people?

Do you have a paperless agency? The paperless agency is becoming more common than ever before. In the last 20 years, even the last decade, the reliance of the insurance agency on automation has increased significantly. While it once may have been adequate to store client files and policy information manually, this is no longer considered efficient or cost effective.

Do you know the most effective way to protect your private information? It sounds simple, but it is incredibly effective: You must get good at managing your passwords. Here are three of the best ways to do that:

Ever wonder how hackers gain access to online accounts at home or at the office? There are a variety of different ways, but one of the most common is by using the right password. That’s right. Criminals can gain access to your private information because they either have or can easily guess your login credentials. Unfortunately, most of us make it far too easy for criminals to access their accounts that way. Here are some common ways hackers gain access to your agency’s accounts and your own — and what you can do to thwart them:

As a busy insurance professional, you have a lot of demands on your time. And there’s only so much time in each day and week to work on your to-do list. How do you handle the time you have to run your insurance business? Here are some ways to better manage the time you have to serve your customers and manage your agency.

Finding great employees for your insurance agency can be challenging. That’s why interviewing job applicants is such a critical step in the hiring process. Talking to an applicant in person and observing how they answer your questions can help you determine whether they have the right skills and knowledge for the position and if they’ll fit well into your workforce.

There’s a lot of room for improvement when it comes to educating employees about cybersecurity. Case in point: the cybersecurity awareness training firm KnowBe4′s State of Privacy and Security Awareness Report. This report details the state of employee awareness and practices — and it’s not good news for most organizations.

Have you ever felt misunderstood? We all have. That’s why perception checking is such an important skill. Simply put, perception-checking involves directly asking another person for clarity to ensure you’re understanding what they’re trying to say with their words or body language.