Network Matches At-Home Insurance Retirees with Employers

Introducing WAHVE, Where Outsourcing Is Not a Foreign Concept

As more and more experienced insurance agency and carrier employees discover their retirement income isn’t what they thought it would be, many are happy to find work they can do from home to supplement their income. That’s where Sharon Emek and her new organization, WAHVE, or Work At Home Vintage Employees, come in. Emek recently explained what WAHVE is about in an interview with Insurance Journal’s Andy Simpson at the MarketScout Entrepreneurial Insurance Symposium in Dallas. WAHVE is one of the finalists in the Entrepreneurial Insurance Awards

This sounds like a new twist on outsourcing. What kind of network are you putting together?

Emek: [W[hat I’m doing is finding all our amazing retirees in the insurance space. As you know, the Baby Boomer population is beginning to retire. Our average age in the industry is 54. And we have an amazing amount of talent and brainpower out there that has retired from the industry but still needs to work. They just want to go into what we are calling today phased retirement. They left because they didn’t want to work in an office from nine to five, and so they retired. And until now, they didn’t have the opportunity to stay in the industry because, once they retired, they had to find some part-time work near their home. So some of them have become massage therapists, work in the hardware store. With WAHVE, it gives them the opportunity to actually work from their homes, in the industry that they’ve worked for 30, 40 years, doing something that they know and love.

What kind of talent are we talking about?

Emek: They’re CSRs, account executives, underwriters, claims people. They worked at agencies, brokers, wholesalers, insurers. They’re amazingly qualified. They are CICs, ARMs, CPCUs, all over the country, with extraordinary experience and an amazing amount of knowledge.

A number of years ago, you couldn’t have done this because the technology wasn’t there to work remotely from home. And also, in past years, people weren’t as technologically savvy as they are today. But people in their 60s are very savvy. The second-fastest-growing users of Facebook are women in their 60s. People who are retired actually stay involved, in fact, even get more involved with technology, because they’re bored, so they play on the computer.

You have all the right conditions. It’s like the perfect storm. The technology exists. The amazing retirement population now exists. And the ability for them to work remotely at home and do all kinds of process work and customer-service work, working exclusively for an agency – it’s not like a call center where you pick up the first call. Actually, what we do is we match them up to the right firm, and they exclusively work for that firm, remotely from their home.

You mentioned that they’re in all parts of the country. Are we also talking other countries? Are they in India and China?

Emek: Absolutely not. These are our retirees. It’s about keeping jobs in America. What we say is that outsourcing is not a foreign concept. So with WAHVE, we outsource here to our own retirees as opposed to overseas. And believe it or not, we’re pretty competitive. We’re more, but not appreciably more, because retirees already have a retirement income, and they’re getting Social Security or about to get Social Security. So they need to do this to supplement their retirement income, since it’s not where they thought it would be when they wanted to retire. And because they work from home, they take much less pay. They’re just happy to earn more money, to do something they love, and to do it at the convenience of their home, and so they can have more a balanced retirement.

Are there cost savings to the agent or carrier that might be looking at this?

Emek: Absolutely. It’s about a 40 to 50 percent cost saving on hiring a staff person.

You have benefits. You have overhead. You have training. You have turnover. And with a retired person who’s working for WAHVE, because they already have a retirement plan, you can’t give them a retirement plan. They already have their health benefits. It’s Medicare, or they’re on their husband’s and about to get their Medicare. And so you’re saving all those benefits. And you save on the overhead; they’re working from home. We supply them with the dual monitors and upgrade their technology. So there’s minimal cost.

Not all jobs can be outsourced or done remotely. What kind of work do you recommend can be done remotely?

Emek: Well, what I typically say is that there are thousands of processes that are done every day in an agency. And many agencies, as well as insurers, are really process-oriented as opposed to client-oriented, and they don’t realize it. They focus so much on the process as opposed to sufficient client contact, cross-selling, making sure that there’s client satisfaction.

So we say, why don’t you look at all the processes that are preventing your staff from being very effective and promoting client satisfaction and cross-selling, and we will take over those processes. Which are typically policy checking – you don’t need to be in an office to do policy checking – certificates of insurance, comparative rating of policies, preparing for a renewal, collecting and analyzing loss runs. There is all kinds of process work that can be done in support of your CSRs and your account executives so that they don’t have to do that work.

And not only that, when they do that work, they’re constantly interrupted. So you can start checking a policy at an agent’s office, and then a client calls. But you must take the client’s call. You can’t not take that call. So then you stop checking the policy. Then you get another call. You go back to check the policy, you have to practically start all over again because you’ve stopped in the middle and you have to make sure you’re at the right place and didn’t miss anything.

So it’s a very inefficient process, actually getting that process work done, because it’s constantly interrupted in an agent’s office. If you outsource it to a WAHVE, they’re totally focused on that process, there are no interruptions, and they get the work done very, very quickly.

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