My brother Brock and I are at that age that we could probably stick it out doing the same thing day in and day out for another 10 years, sell Colley Insurance to the highest bidder and slide into retirement. I don’t know about you but just writing that last line sent a chill down my spine. It sounded like the perfect plan to ensure that one day I would wake up and realize that I was bored and irrelevant. Something had to change and there had to be a commitment to that change. We had to commit to seizing the bull by the horns, meeting the future head on, diving right in and every other cliché you can think of to describe what we need to do to ensure the survival of our business beyond our own involvement. And that’s exactly what we want to do – leave something that is a little bit better prepared for the future than it was when we first became involved with it.

One very large step we took this year was investing in a Customer Relationship Management System or CRM designed specifically for the insurance industry. The CRM was meant to provide a way for us to communicate timely and valuable information electronically to our customers. It has done that and so much more. We recently sent out a communication to our customers about the newly available Overland Water coverage provided by Aviva. We also sent information on the newly legislated Winter Tire Discount and included a form that customers could complete and return electronically advising us that they qualified for the discount. We received and processed over 300 requests for discounts in a 48 hour period. The CRM was meant to do things like this but some where along the way it also opened our eyes to a whole new world of possibilities. Part of the process was to develop our 5th web site. Instead of placing the same content from our old site into a new format we developed all new content. While we were doing this we realized that we wanted our site to look more customer-friendly which led to doing some re-branding. You will now see our Border Colley Mascot throughout the web site but more than that you’ll see the values that we have aligned with the Border Colley and how they mesh with the values of Colley Insurance.

This process has invigorated the organization as a whole. Check out our Facebook page, twitter, and Linked In profiles and you’ll see what I mean.

This post started with the suggestion that maybe Colley Insurance needed to look to the future. Technology is definitely one of the things we have done to propel ourselves forward but you’ll see in my next post that that’s not all we have done. The Millennials are coming and we’re welcoming them with open arms or, in keeping with our new branding, I guess I should say with open paws…