To paraphrase the late, great Rodney Dangerfield, independent insurance agents don’t get no respect.

It’s bad enough that a recent career survey ranked your profession below janitors, bookbinders and even editors (see my related blog, ”At least you’re not a roustaboust“). Now, the latest Forrester Research consumer survey reveals that your customers don’t even find you fun.

The survey, conducted over the Internet last October, gave independent agents an overall score of “okay” from 4,600 consumers who had interacted with a variety of companies. Forrester asked consumers to rate insurance companies on three areas: “meets needs,” “easy to work with” and “enjoyable.” Several insurers, including USAA, Liberty Mutual, Progressive and The Hartford, were ranked “good” by respondents. But when it came to being “enjoyable,” consumers rated independent agents “poor,” while giving them “good” ratings for “meets needs” and “easy to work with.”

What does this mean? Evidently it’s not an ease-of-use issue; respondents ranked agents “good” on meeting customer needs and being easy to work with. And it’s not just a carrier issue, either. Savvy carriers know, and slower carriers are discovering, that it’s not enough to simply provide ease of use through technology and real-time services — in fact, that’s just the starting point (see this related article on Deep Customer Connections’ recent survey on agents telling carriers they need more ease of use).  

From just looking at the numbers, the problem seems to be with the agency system itself, as several carriers got high marks from consumers as being enjoyable to work with. Granted, the results may be skewed because of the focus on personal lines insurance purchasers, but this dissing of insurance agents shouldn’t be the case. It all boils down to the perception of insurance agent as unnecessary middleman, useful perhaps, but more likely just another roadblock between the customer and the underwriter.

The irony is, agents are in a much better position to deliver real customer satisfaction — and yes, even “fun” – than any insurer ever could. In our monthly agency success stories, we speak with agency owners, especially those in small towns or rural areas, who don’t think twice about emergency customer visits, of knowing the names and ages of teenaged drivers about to be added to a family’s auto policy, of engaging customers in intimate conversations to discover their plans for the future and how insurance coverage can help protect those plans. These agencies and their employees are also connecting to their communities through charitable work, recruitment at area schools, and other ways to create engagement with customers and prospects. It’s a testament to the level of service that every independent agent should be providing to valued customers, especially at a time when every customer counts.

And inevitably in today’s world, part of that customer outreach is through intelligently developed and executed social media planning. Maybe that’s where the smart carriers have an edge on agencies — they have the financial wherewithal and staffing to plunge right in. (Luckily, you don’t need these resources to make good use of this new tool: check out ACT’s recommendations for creating a social media policy for your independent agency). 

With more insurers, including traditional direct writers, using multiple distribution methods, the stakes are higher than ever for agents to prove themselves invaluable to their customers — not just by meeting their insurance needs in a smart and timely way, but by engaging with them on multiple levels.

What’s your agency doing to build your brand perception with your customers?

In our December look at agency Internet marketing, the first question in our reader survey was, “Does your agency/brokerage have a Web site?” The response was 81%. Why not 100%, you might ask.

Another person asking was Duke Williams, a blogger and consultant on agency Internet use. Last month, Duke decided to conduct an informal survey of “feet on the street results for actual agency Web presence.” His methodology was simple: he used the “find an agent” feature on many insurance carrier Web sites, and Googled the term “car insurance city name state name.” He used the SuperPages, YellowPages and about a half dozen other lists online.

In individually searching several locations in South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Florida, he found:

• 248 independent agencies
• 49 Nationwide agencies
• 19 online-only agencies
• 51 State Farm agencies
• 26 Allstate agencies
• 7 Farmers agencies
• 7 Alpha agencies
• 2 Farm Bureau agencies
• 1 GEICO local agency
• 1 Direct General agency (rregional non-standard auto insurance carrier with owned agency locations)

While these results seem to indicate a strong presence for independent agencies, a closer look tells another story. Of the 248 independent agencies that came up in the search, only 64 — a paltry 25.8% — had a Web site, and only a fraction turned up in the Google “local results” search.

Delving deeper, Duke discovered that the agencies with Web sites weren’t consistent in functionality, even in non-real-time. For instance, 51.6% had quote request forms, but only 12.5% had “request a policy change” forms, and only 20.3% had “report a claim” forms. Not surprisingly, Duke reported that all the national direct writers had very high functionality.

While you could argue that Duke’s results are atypical — focused on a limited geographic area and a single line of business — you’d be missing the point. In every way, direct writers are making it easy for consumers to find and use their products and services — and it isn’t all about price.

Woody Allen once said that “80% of success is showing up.” When it comes to Web pages, the odds are even better if you show up with a functional product that makes it as easy as possible for people to use what you have to offer.

When the countdown ends on 2009, it also brings an end to the first decade of the new millennium. It’s hard to believe how much our world has changed in those 10 short years, from global terrorism (still happening) to the financial meltdown to the ascendancy of the Internet. Let’s look at just a few:

Everything tech. Yes, the Internet was around at the turn of the century, but it wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is now. Since then, a whole generation has grown up with this technology, and that generation is our future employees and customers. While all this has made our lives a lot easier, it’s also phased out a lot of what we were confortable with and raised the bar on customer expectations. A mixed blessing, to say the least.

A world of new risks. The world is smaller, and the risks you underwrite are not like anything that’s been insured before. Acts of terrorism, environmental exposures, professional liability related to new technology standards and expectations — they’re all in the mix, with new risks coming at us every day. The challenge for our industry will be to keep one step ahead of anything new that comes along.

A bigger, smaller agency universe. The agency/brokerage M&A boom may have slowed to a trickle, but the activity of the past 10 years has altered the landscape forever. Big brokerages have gotten bigger by increasingly targeting the midmarket customers that have long been the bread and butter of the average agency. Conversely, the latest IIABA Agency Universe numbers suggest that smaller, startup agencies are on the rise, thanks in large part to the availability of sophisticated automation systems that allow them to compete with bigger players.

More eyes on the industry. Public/political scrutiny of the insurance industry is nothing new, but the seismic financial upheavals of the past 10 years — from the Enron fiasco in 2002 to last year’s subprime mortgage meltdown and AIG bailout and current healthcare debate — have put this most risk-averse industry in the spotlight more than ever before.

And while nobody can predict what the next 10 years will bring, it’s a safe bet that the trends we saw begin at the dawn of the century will continue to play a significant role going forward. And while 2009 was a good year in that we dodged a lot of bullets — from natural disasters to truly bad legislation — it’s inevitable that we’ll stand to take a hit from these and other problems in the future.

What were your biggest concerns in 2009, and what do you predict will dominate the headlines in 2010?

Maybe I just have fraud on the brain since attending last week’s annual PLUS International Conference in Chicago (see our Web exclusive article on data breach), where the subject came up a lot, but there does seem to be a lot of synchronicity about fraud issues in the zeitgeist lately. 

Just today, National Underwriter posted the findings of a new PricewaterhouseCoopers global economic crime survey showing that insurance was the second most fraud-prone industry, right after communications. It’s not surprising that insurance is a target, given the amount of data used in processing products and services. Typical crimes include asset misappropriation (such as inventory theft), accounting fraud, and bribery — all crimes that are easier to commit because of reduced resources deployed for internal controls, according to PwC.

The threat is just as real for the average joe, especially in a world fueled by virtual transactions. Electronic data files are dismayingly easy to hack for expert criminals who know what they’re doing, according to Lori Nugent, partner at law firm Wilson Elser Moskowicz Edelman & Dicker. Lori, a specialist in the security breach area, scared the bejezuz out of me by describing how easy it is for sophisticated hackers, many of whom are part of huge international fraud rings, to grab data like credit card and Social Security numbers and ruin your life.

For agents, the burden is on you to protect your customers’ confidential information — hence the FTC “red flags” ruling. But you shouldn’t need a federal mandate to establish internal safeguards for your firm. In a conversation about data security breaches on the LinkedIn ACT group, several readers offered recommendations on how to start, including:

• Creating a data security plan and establishing proper controls
• Limiting data access with proper security rights assignment
• Establishing a system to eliminate paper in an encrypted repository
• Limiting access to confidential life/health data to restricted employees
• Limiting the ability to access personal information between commercial and personal files
• Establishing security settings so only producers have access to their clients’ data 

Tech guy Steve Anderson has written a book on client data security that’s worth a read — check it out at www.clientdatasecurity.com.

Meantime, with the red flags law looming, what are you doing to secure your clients’ data?

While I was attending the ASCnet TENCon in Kansas City earlier this month, CIAB made big news by announcing a partnership with LexisNexis to build a Web-based insurance exchange for independent producers.

The project, which goes into testing next summer, is designed to make interface easier between insurers and producers– a subject near and dear to the heart of Jeff Yates, the head of IIABA’s ACT group.

However, he cautioned, “let’s not lose sight of the tools we already have” in the ongoing quest for information sharing–specifically, the real time initiative that he and many others have been tirelessly promoting for years. (No coincidence that ASCnet’s new chair is Lisa Parry Becker, whose passion about real time is well documented in the industry.)

Do you think the CIAB insurance exchange will take hold in the industry?