Insurance Journal Forums

Good afternoon all,
I am looking for an idea of what should be expected of a CSR to be able to handle as far as their workload.
So here's my question, a small agency with appx. $2,000,000 premium volume split between personal lines and commercial accounts. Total number of accounts appx. 300 personal lines and 100 commercial. How many CSR's would you use to service the book and how would you split it up?
Thanks,
Shagster

See post from March: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9630

IN my humble opinion, after having done the "csr" thing for 35 years, one person could handle that volume of business. Of course, that would require that they have knowledge of both commercial and personal lines. I have an ACSR in both and handle 95% of the csr work in my office, including, being the receptionist, rater, quoter, selling new business and the self named "certificate of insurance queen".There are only two of us in an office of about the same premium volume.

If you have an efficient system in place, this should not be a problem.

Thank you for the responses.
Brenda, you must be Superwoman indeed. As a former Producer I have seen CSRs fail handling half that volume on 30 accounts.... I was truly expecting to need to staff 2-3 CSR's. But I guess to find one of you would then be priceless!
Thank you for your input I am amazed and awed!

thanks for the kind words. I would guess it would depend also on the type of accounts that you are handling. I have mostly only done small to medium commercial with my personal lines. If you are handling exclusively large commercial accounts, then the game would change. I have done this for so long, I remember having to type certificates in quadruplicate! So I guess my view might be a little skewed.

We run a commercial P&C agency. Average size of our accounts is 15k. We have 3 agents and 3 CSRs. The size of our book is little over 11 million. I would not hire more than one CSR for your book. I dont even know how you could afford to hire more than one. I guess it all depends on the type of business you sell and the management system you are using. Ours does a lot of the work for us. Our system lets us allow our customers to log in to their insured portal and send their own certificates. We produce about 150 to 200 certs a day, if it was not for the self server certificates feature we use, I guess we would have had to hire more help too. This saves us a lot of time.