Salaries, Benefits, Culture Matter but That’s Not Always Enough

By Andrea Wells

Independent agency owners, producers, and support staff continue to report higher pay, according to Insurance Journal’s national online Agency Salary Survey results. But for the second year in a row, survey respondents report a decline in satisfaction when thinking about their compensation.

“When I hear from insurance professionals that they aren’t happy with compensation, typically that is a symptom of something else,” said Mary Newgard, partner and senior search consultant for Capstone Search Group, a national recruiting firm dedicated to the insurance industry.

Newgard, also the author of Insurance Journal’s Ask the Insurance Recruiter monthly column, said when employees think about leaving, their dissatisfaction may be coming from other things built around compensation–not just money.

“Is the employee challenged in their role? Are there career advancement opportunities? Are they happy with the people that they work with?”

Newgard said employees also may decide to leave out of concern for the future of the agency. Is the agency stable? Do the agency owners make good decisions? Does the employee enjoy the agency’s culture?

In today’s fast-paced, hard-market conditions, employees may feel overworked. “‘Do they just keep dumping on me more without recognizing where I’m at?’ These are the same kinds of secondary factors that are tied to compensation that employees consider important outside of compensation,” she said.

Newgard said that years ago these soft benefits were “wellness programs, gym memberships, increased benefits, and volunteer time off.”

“These things get bubble wrapped around compensation to make somebody a very happy employee and a retained employee,” she said.

Today, employees value a flexible work schedule, opportunities for career advancement, and culture. So, while compensation alone will make a few insurance professionals make a job change, more often employees leave when they feel an imbalance between comp, career opportunities, and agency culture, Newgard said.

“That’s when agencies see a lot of turnover, too,” she noted. “It might be easy for some agencies to change comp, but just changing comp alone is not usually good enough to correct retention issues.”

Finding balance between those key issues is important to retaining and maybe even attracting new talent, Newgard added.

Service Roles in High Demand

The hard insurance market–and the need to remarket accounts as a result–is pushing the demand for service roles even more than last year, according to Art Betancourt, founder and CEO of AEBetancourt, a national professional placement and executive recruiting firm for the industry.

Betancourt told Insurance Journal that in 2023, his firm saw recruiting efforts focused about 50/50 on service staff and producers. In 2024, his firm spent about 60% of its recruiting on service positions alone.

“We’re seeing a lot of agencies, especially with the hard market, with a huge need for service,” he said. He expects that need to continue to increase in 2025. “Even though we’ve seen an increase in employees in the sector, it is still nowhere close to enough to meet the demand, especially with all the retirements that continue to happen as the industry ages. Service is definitely a huge need.”

Newgard always tells her clients that the biggest role–and most frequent position to hire for–will always be the client service professional or account manager. Agencies compete with other firms, maybe even just across the street, for experienced talent.

“The job descriptions for account managers at those agencies is basically the same,” she said. It’s mostly a lateral move. “So, you have to ask the question: ‘What is it that’s going to attract somebody at my competitor’s office to come do that same role and that same function for me?’”

It’s a stronger compensation plan that builds in “different variables,” she said. Compensation “plus the other things wrapped around it will create the trifecta that every agency should be striving for,” she added. “Because if they strive for that trifecta of career advancement within the position itself, a very strong culture–however you choose to define that–and a strong, multifaceted compensation plan, then that helps you not only attract that talent but retain it.”

Some good news, according to Betancourt, is while service role salaries in independent agencies are not trending down, the upward pressure is not as aggressive as two years ago.

“Comp is still growing–we still see it trending up–but we’re not seeing as much of the crazy ‘we’ll pay anything’ type numbers, especially from the large national brokers,” he said. “We’re not seeing big comp packages as the reason people leave as much as we have in the past.” But he agrees that more movement is happening in service positions because of undesirable agency culture or when employees feel overworked. “People are willing to buckle down and get work done with limited resources, but they have to know that leadership is working to solve it.”

Skills Matter

Client-facing support people are extremely valuable in today’s hard market as agencies have seen increased workloads over the past several years. Technical skills and insurance coverage knowledge will always be valued skillsets for customer support, but softer skills such as the ability to interact with clients–in a human way–could make account managers and CSRs even more valuable in the future, according to Kevin Stipe, partner and CEO of Reagan Consulting.

The price to hire a high-quality account manager or CSR has gone up nationwide as agencies compete for the best talent in a remote working world, he said.

“California and New York agencies were going into the heartland and offering people the opportunity to work remotely, and that bid up the compensation levels,” he said. “But I think the thing that’s most interesting to me right now is how AI is going to play into this.”

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are making big leaps in agency productivity on many fronts, Stipe said, but clients will always want a human. “So, the soft skills of client-facing support [people] are going to get more valuable as the technical skills that are also part of that job become more commoditized,” he predicted. “You can equip people with AI to be able to answer questions more effectively than before,” he said. But a computer is never going to be able to do what a human can do, Stipe said. “You want to trust a human being. You want empathy from a human being. You want a human being that can read the tone of your voice and respond,” he said.

“Customer service reps in our industry–really good ones–fuse together that empathy, emotional IQ, with technical knowledge and the ability to answer questions and adapt to situations and make sure things get done,” Stipe said. “I think what we’re going to see with AI is some of those technical skills, AI can handle, but AI can’t handle the emotional IQ stuff.” And those “soft human skills are so essential to have happy clients,” he said.

Newgard added that soft skills are as important now as they will be in the future. “Agencies have thought about efficiency for a long time,” she told Insurance Journal. “It’s one of the reasons we see so many outsource policy administration to third-party companies.”

But as AI forces agencies to think about division of duties in different ways, it’s important to understand that technology will never be a solution for everything, she added.

“There is no technology that can replace parts of the process that require human interaction,” she said. There are elements within insurance that are transactional. “Some interactions can be automated, but when it comes to building relationships, working through conflict, and addressing complex needs, I don’t think AI can replace people.” This applies to many facets of an agency, from selling to and servicing clients to recruiting and retaining top talent, Newgard said.

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