The Painful Truth about Working Weekends
February 3rd, 2009 by Jeb Foster
Over the years, we’ve fielded regular requests from agents who would like to “turn off” lead delivery on the weekends.
While we can understand their point of view, when these requests arise we gently remind them that our primary goal is to help people find insurance—quickly. That’s the promise we make to consumers who visit our site—which is open for business 24/7—and we strive to do that by matching them with local agents in real time.
Nearly a quarter of the visitors to our site come on the weekends.
Further, we expect our agents to contact their leads quickly, and not just because it results in a better experience for the consumer, but because it increases the agent’s chances of making the sale.
According to research conducted by James Oldroyd, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, contacting a lead within five minutes results in a 500 percent higher response rate than waiting 10 minutes.
For many busy households, the weekend is simply the only time available to purchase insurance. (The same goes for buyers of houses and cars—which is why sellers of houses and cars work weekends.)
Sure, the life-work balance is very important, but insurance agents, like others in sales, often have to strike that balance by working atypical hours—taking days off on Thursday and Friday, for example, or logging four hours on Saturday and Sunday for lead follow-up and working a couple of half days during the week.
Veteran producers with a large book of business can more easily get away with a traditional M-F schedule, but newcomers to the industry will find it pretty difficult, if not impossible.
To sum up, as long as consumers seek to find the right insurance on the weekends, we’ll try to help them, and we hope our agents will do the same.
