An Agent Builds the Back Office He Wished He Had

Andy Priesman is an agent at heart, and Gilad pointed out how rare it is to hear from someone who fought in the trenches of selling the next policy and then built technology and operations for it. Andy started in the business at 25 with New York Life, became a Farmers captive agent, then moved to an independent model and founded Greenway Insurance almost 18 years earlier in Austin, Texas. Three years before this recording, he started Cover Desk.

About Andy Priesman

Andy Priesman is founder and CEO of Cover Desk, which provides virtual assistants and business process outsourcing in the Philippines for insurance agencies, MGAs and insurtechs, and owner of Greenway Insurance.

From Greenway’s Back Office to Cover Desk

A friend suggested years earlier that Andy hire a virtual assistant for Greenway. He asked what he’d give someone eight hours a day, and it turned out to be a lot. He did it again and again, and in less than three years Cover Desk grew to almost 300 people. Greenway has about 20 people in the US and about 20 in the Philippines, a roughly 50/50 split, and it serves as Cover Desk’s beta tester, which Gilad called eating your own dog food.

Andy never aspired to run a BPO. His observation was that at agencies, many employees “stare at their phone all day saying please don’t ring anymore,” because there isn’t enough process or technology. Independent agencies are hard places to recruit for: the work is a grind and not glamorous, and Greenway needed hard workers who cared about the opportunity. Dedicating a team to non-licensed work made his staff happier, more productive and the agency more profitable, which inspired Cover Desk.

Doing It in the Philippines

Cover Desk’s people are all unlicensed (licensed staff may come later, perhaps 20 percent in the US and 80 percent in the Philippines). They are based in Quezon City in Metro Manila, in two sites that hold about 250 people on production floors, and they work directly with clients, unlike typical BPOs where you never meet the American customer. Andy gave a speech on virtual assistants in 2018 before the company existed, and friends then asked him to hire some for them. At first, the assistants worked from home. Operating in another country meant learning quickly: labor laws, regulation, red tape, and, in his words, almost failing five or ten times.

When COVID hit, Cover Desk moved roughly 180 people from the office to their homes in three days, with some needing internet connections and computers moved, which is much harder in the Philippines. Andy misses the office culture, and the team is back in the office in small numbers while largely remote.

Training Insurance, Not Scripts

Early on, Andy assumed he couldn’t offer training because every agency uses different processes, systems and carriers. He learned the opposite. Cover Desk’s staff come from large BPO and call center companies like Verizon, AT&T, Uber and PayPal, where they take 80 to 100 calls a day about internet outages, so Cover Desk built trainers, subject matter experts, operations managers and team leaders. You can’t script insurance, he said, so people go through about four weeks of training before production, then a nesting phase with ongoing training, and retention is good because the work requires using their brains.

Andy’s ideal clients are insurtechs, carriers and MGAs, for work that doesn’t need a license, such as first notice of loss or billing support, and he expects an agency-service-center model for small commercial and personal lines, serving multiple carriers where a carrier service center serves only one.

Agency Trends: Consolidation, Salesforce and Slow APIs

Andy thinks the agency of the future will focus on selling and retention, using technology for the rest. He sees massive consolidation over the next five years among aggregators, networks, clusters and franchises, and says multiples haven’t changed even since COVID. Smaller agencies will have to merge or sell to keep up with technology.

On technology, he thinks agencies will need to live in an omnichannel environment and that fragmented systems are a problem. Greenway is adopting Salesforce, which Andy believes will be a key technology for agencies because it’s customizable, including rating technology for personal lines that cut a 20-minute task to four. He also sees the large agency management systems finally opening up to connect phones, CRMs and other tools.

Gilad was a bit sad to hear Andy’s estimate that it’s a good 10 to 15 years before every carrier has an API: quoting and binding APIs exist for the big ones, but not every carrier has one, and the service side, such as paying a bill, still requires logging into the carrier. Andy thinks that service-side API will take longer than quote-issue-bind. His view of the long run is that carriers get smarter and let agents connect directly, with no middle layer.

Advice: The Founder, an RV, and Barbecue

Andy has two young daughters and said he feels more relaxed from being home with them. He recently took an RV road trip to Colorado that took about 18 hours rather than 13, watched The Founder (the McDonald’s story) for the second time, and has been reading a book about Amazon by an insurance industry figure. He is reachable via LinkedIn or by email at his company. He and Gilad ended on Austin barbecue, where Andy recommended a north-central spot with shorter lines than the famous one.

Key Takeaways

• Cover Desk grew from Greenway’s experience to almost 300 Philippines-based employees in under three years, working directly with US agency clients.
• Trained, insurance-specific assistants beat scripted call-center staff, with about four weeks of training and ongoing nesting.
• Andy predicts heavy agency consolidation in the next five years, and expects small agencies to merge or sell.
• He sees Salesforce as a key agency technology and expects the agency management systems to open up.
• Carrier service-side APIs are, in his view, likely 10 to 15 years away, longer than quote-and-bind APIs.
• Cover Desk wants to serve insurtechs, carriers and MGAs for non-licensed work like FNOL and billing support.