--:-- Ryan Hanley: In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home. Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. Today we have an absolutely tremendous episode for you. Our guest is Ron Schroer, the VP of Sales for Arius Analytics here in North America, the company behind Donna for Agents.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Now, you've heard me talk about Donna for Agents both because I'm a user of Donna for Agents, a believer since the first 10 minutes that I heard the pitch from the CEO, Anurag Shah, who Ron talks a little bit about in the episode, as well as Ron. They were doing a dual presentation in one of Paradiso's events. Although Paradiso had mentioned the tool to me a few months prior, I hadn't had a chance to dig into it. Then I got to meet Anurag and Ron at this event that Paradiso did last September. Ten minutes in, I wanted to tell everyone to leave and just basically spent the rest of that day peppering them with questions, talking about where I saw the product going, all the different use cases. I signed up that week, two days after I got back, I was signed up and ready to go. I have been a user ever since.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I've gotten some pushback from people, not pushback, questions. Better way to put it, questions from people saying, "Hey, Ryan, you're a startup agency. You don't really need this. Off the top of your head, you can remember all your clients. You don't really need that kind of thing." As we talk about in this episode, my investment into Donna as a product we were going to use and implement from day one was more a philosophical core belief in who we want to be as a company as much as it was us needing the product. I want to build Rogue and anything else that comes out of Rogue. I want it to be built on understanding at a deep level our customers so that we can be better at serving them. We get into that in depth.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Ron is a tremendous human, not just a tremendous professional in our industry. He goes into his background, his history. We talk a lot about Donna. We talk a lot about data analytics, its uses. We provide a bunch of use cases, and I think you're just going to love this episode. Whether you ever use Donna or not, whether analytics is something you're into or not, I think when you hear us walk through some of the potential use cases for this type of information, why I'm so bullish on a tool like Donna and other tools that do this... Not everyone gives the same information the same way. Neon is working on a lot of this. Obviously, I'm a huge fan of that product as well. I'm just not on Salesforce yet, so I can't get to Neon. But this is the kind of episode where my hope is you get to feel a little bit of what is possible if you dig into the data you have in your agency, however you get to it. I think you're going to love it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Because Donna is also a sponsor of this show, although this episode has nothing to do with them being a sponsor. Whether they were or weren't, I'd still want Ron on the show because he's an awesome dude and Donna's a great product and very interesting. I'll just say go to DonnaForAgents.com and get the demo. Go to DonnaForAgents.com and get the demo. Just know what the product is about. That's all I'm asking. I didn't let you down on Tarmica. I haven't let you down on Mick Hunt and the work he does at Premier Strategy Box. I haven't let you down on Chris Langell and Advisory Evolved when Better Agency was a sponsor. Better Agency is tremendous. Every tool that I have as a sponsor of this show that I talk about are tools that I believe in. I believe in these tools. Donna for Agents is one of those tools. Whether you ever end up using them or not is of no consequence. Just know that this is out here and what it can do because maybe you find something else similar to it that works for your agency. I want you to know. I want you to be aware. I think it's important. I think it helps us serve our customers better. I think it helps us deliver on the true value proposition of what an independent insurance agency is meant to be. It's just a great pleasure to provide you with this episode. All right, let's get to it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yo, dude. There he is. What's up, man? How are you?
--:-- Ron Schroer: Good, dude. Just doing the thing here, trying to keep the agency going and talking to cool cats like yourself.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Oh, that's always fun talking to you too, my friend. Dude, a couple big announcements lately. You got Portals with Bradley Flowers, and then the other one like two days ago, three days ago.
--:-- Ron Schroer: Yeah. Coverica was out too as well. We got Bradley's compadre and I Protect too. Looking forward to these. We got a couple other exciting things going on too. Some little bit larger strategic relationships that should be rolling out here over the next few months. It's amazing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, I'm so happy for you guys. All you sons of bitches at home, I've been telling you. I called Tarmica and now I'm calling Donna. So if you're not on it, then just deal with it. We're going to get into exactly what Donna is, why it's so exciting, why I like it, why you got involved in this project. I also want to share a little bit about your backstory with the audience as well, just because you're one of the good guys in the space that people should know who just want to be connected. I like to give everyone at home a hard time since I'm basically always right on my calls. I had Donna very early. I'm only half joking. I'm occasionally wrong, but it's rare.
--:-- Ron Schroer: No, man.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So dude, let's get into it. First, before we talk about what's going on and all that kind of stuff, I want to talk about data analytics in general and some of the use cases that you guys are seeing. I think there's a lot of really fun things to talk about. But before that, let's just give everyone a quick backdrop on your history in the space because this isn't your first foray into data and analytics in the insurance industry. If you can just go back as far as you think is relevant, we can do that.
--:-- Ron Schroer: Yeah, for sure. I appreciate it, Ron. Always a pleasure talking to you, and it is an honor being on your podcast, man. You had a lot of great rock stars, a lot of people in the industry that are very influential and doing some phenomenal things. So I'm very excited to talk to you today.
--:-- Ron Schroer: My background, I've been in sales for roughly 16 years, coming straight out of school, a lot of professional services and technology. But the last seven years have been in the insurance industry. It's kind of funny when you have those certain events happen within your career. I got fired from my one job that I was in with Thompson Reuters because of a non-compete with my prior company. The non-compete had some teeth in it, and those things are kind of fun to deal with. I had to get out of the industry. So like a lot of people, I fell into insurance.
--:-- Ron Schroer: I had an opportunity to go and be a producer for Huntington Insurance, which is a top 50, top 60 brokerage in the country, out of their Pittsburgh office. They were starting the process of bringing in people from outside of the industry and teach them insurance from a mentorship standpoint, obviously the technical aspects. This was roughly around 2013 when this happened, right at the same time of Obamacare, or ACA for that matter. I was on the EB side of things too, so that was really an interesting time to come into the industry, especially in that perspective. But I always had a really interest on the PNC side, commercial risk for that and even personal lines for that matter. We had a chance to kind of work in conjunction with those different business units.
--:-- Ron Schroer: I was at Huntington for a couple years. I love the industry. It is so well connected with the people, just how the industry has an influence on what goes on with the rest of the world because everybody needs insurance. You learn so much about everybody's business, regardless if it's a manufacturing company, a healthcare company, even the personal side of things too. I think that gives you a really unique perspective of the importance of risk management in a lot of different ways.
--:-- Ron Schroer: When I was working through with Huntington, I started to look at what technologies we were trying to utilize for me to generate business myself as a producer, but just to operate the business in general. I think a lot of your listeners, and you've talked about a lot, there's been a lot of change in the last five years. But if you go back seven years ago, it was still very, very stale as far as what access you had to understand opportunities to grow a book of business, to even understand exactly what you had as a book of business and where those opportunities might be. I've always loved the technology side.
--:-- Ron Schroer: Eventually, I got a call from the gentleman who placed me at Huntington. He used to be the head of global sales at Aon and then before that at Sedgwick, so he had some big jobs. He called me and said, "Hey, I got an opportunity for you that I think you're going to be perfect for because you got the tech background and you also got your feet wet in insurance too. It's with a company called RiskMatch." RiskMatch is a data analytics company that was originally founded by Kabir Syed. Kabir was the head of commercial operations for Marsh, and he built Marsh's internal analytics platform called Market Connect. What Market Connect did, if you think about how big Marsh is, it basically brought together all those different data points. I need to understand my client base better, my carriers better, the economics of my trading relationships with my carriers. Just give me visibility into my book so I can make decisions.
--:-- Ron Schroer: He left Marsh after being there for 17 or so years and started RiskMatch. What RiskMatch did was bring that same concept to middle market insurance agents and brokers to give them the same resources that the big boys have. I was there for four and a half years, split roughly two years before the acquisition within Vertifor. We built a business, had a fantastic team. I was by far the youngest, most inexperienced person on that team as it pertains to insurance. But my God, the client engagement managers, the sales leaders that were a part of that organization and what I was able to learn and take from that was just phenomenal.
--:-- Ron Schroer: After the acquisition with Vertifor, I was there another two and a half years or so. We got acquired in April 2017. I ended up leaving in November of 2019. Vertifor is fantastic. They treated me well. They helped us grow that organization. It provided me a lot more opportunities to get to know hundreds of different agencies, what their challenges were, how we could potentially solve them. I just fell in love with the technology side of the insurance industry.
--:-- Ron Schroer: As the evolution turns, you get through an acquisition, you start to look at career pathing and whatnot. I was ready to take more of a meaningful role within another scaling organization. Arius reached out to me in summer of 2019, and we started having conversations. Arius is really unique because we are still in that data and analytics realm, but what Arius does is they are most concerned with knowing what's going on with my end customer. The end customer is the most important thing to any insurance agent, brokerage, anything in the world, even a carrier for that matter, because without that customer, nothing happens.
--:-- Ron Schroer: What we want to do at Arius is bring better insight to what's happening with my end customers so you can make better decisions on how you can engage them, where can I go to sell them the policies that are right for them at the right point in time, and are they in a good spot with us right now for us to be able to approach them for that? Or are there some retention challenges that they may have and what can we do to make sure we're hanging on to our clients? I think that's the most important thing that agencies that we work with now. You've got such a huge goldmine of opportunity within your existing clients. New business is always important, I'm not discounting that, but if you take a deep look inside the opportunities you have, you can grow exponentially with the customers that are already in your door. It's way less expensive from a retention standpoint, and then also from a front end organic growth standpoint. If you could save a point of retention, it makes it easier to get your growth goals in place. That's what our technology ultimately does, help agencies do that and carriers for that matter too.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, I think that being where I sit today, having spent time in the technology side of our business and specifically the exposure you get to agencies, the ability to talk to producers, customer success leaders, agency owners, and get all these different perspectives and insights because there's just so many ways to skin this business. There really aren't two agencies that you can set side by side and go, "Hey, they do it the same way." Even if they look and feel the same, they both can serve small business, they can approach it from 15 different angles and none of them are the same. Coming at this from a technology side is one of the few places that you really get to see that because you're trying to help all these different institutions fit your product or use your product to fit in. It's this weird problem solving thing. It is a dynamic place to be and an opportunity to understand our industry in a way that many don't.
--:-- Ron Schroer: Without a doubt. You think about the last five years and the investment that's coming into the industry. Outside of the private equity side that's aggregating agencies, but from the technology standpoint, the amount of players that are out there. You have the legacy players like Vertifor and Applied, Hawksaw's been a fantastic partner too, and all the other agency management systems like NALSERT and QQ and so on, which are part of Vertifor. I think it's interesting because a lot of people sometimes start a product and then try to find a problem. I think what was unique when I came to Aureus is Frank Centner on our board, we were kind of going through business plans when I was presenting for them to even hire me as well. Frank said, "I think this could be applicable to the agency channel of it." So we took our foundational product that we had before for carriers called Crux, which is still there, but we developed this Donna product because agencies need access to that technology.
--:-- Ron Schroer: If you think about some of the largest industries, everybody knows everything about us as consumers. You can hop into Amazon or anywhere, they're going to be able to trigger right away what Ron's most likely to buy, what Ryan's most likely to buy because of his last transactions. We just want to bring that easy insight to agencies so they know where to go to be able to grow. You look at some of the awesome technologies. You mentioned small business. We work closely with the Tarmica team to be able to make small business profitable. Agency Zoom, some of the voice companies like Lightspeed and Cotter Group. There's just so many awesome companies that are out there right now. Rocket Referrals to be able to engage as well. There's a unique set. I would love Donna to be in the hands of every single agency out there too, but there's a lot of different opportunities to build out a pretty unique tech stack that's going to help you scale as an agency. I think that's the first step you got to do is just figure out what's my end goal, and then be able to build backwards from that and then what technologies are going to match up with that too.
--:-- Ron Schroer: I think we're getting closer to this connected ecosystem of all these API connected tech partners that can really help you make your workflow very efficient, help you get to your goals a lot faster too. Even Vertifor and Applied, they're getting down the road of being able to connect to some of these outside technologies that aren't underneath their ownership because they know it's going to bring value to their underlying clients. I think there's a lot of reasons to be optimistic in the industry right now.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I completely agree with that latter statement. I think this is one of the most exciting times that has ever happened to our industry. Take my own story. I started an agency seven days before COVID hit and we're still here. The only reason that's possible is because of the technology that's available in the marketplace today. We've only met with two of our clients in person, two in 15 months. That's not saying that's the way you have to go, just that's one of the many thousands of ways that you can do this business.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I spoke to Andrew Ryan and Jack Hurtvik yesterday. They will actually be the episode that comes out right before this one. We were talking about how you're seeing two ecosystems evolve. You have ecosystems like Vertifor and Applied who have kind of doubled into being a full stack solution. They're going to go top to bottom. They're going to have the marketing automation, the data analytics, all their pieces in one stack. Then you have the Agency Zooms, the Better Agencies, the Now Certs, the Hawksoffs that are taking tools like Donna, like Rocket Referrals, different VoIP systems, different texting systems. They're basically just creating these open ubiquitous connections that let you pick and choose what you want to use as an agency and what fits you. Agencies are kind of self-selecting into what model works best for them. For some of them, it is just, "Hey Applied, give me everything that I need, and I'll work within the confines of that system and be perfectly happy." Then you have other people who are like, "No, I want to be able to plug this in and take a little one of these, and I'd rather use this tool." I think that speaks to where we are as the maturation of our industry from a technology perspective. It's just one more exciting piece.
--:-- Ron Schroer: I want to jump back to your comment too, as far as you starting the agency before COVID. I think COVID proved a lot. I kind of use you as an example of the grit that's involved within this industry and how awesome it is, because that had to be incredibly challenging. If you think about any organization to be able to shift like that too, you mentioned they would not have been able to do it without technology. All of us, you and I were together a month, month and a half ago up in Boston. That was one of the best times we've all had in roughly a year, because we're all together hanging out in person, hanging out at the hotel, talking about the industry, talking about all kinds of fun stuff and just getting our relationships closer. That relationship aspect is never going away in this industry. It is so vital and important.
--:-- Ron Schroer: There's a lot of people that may sit there and think some of these technologies are going to disintermediate those relationships. It's not that. We're going to help enhance this. I look at the past year and a half. Anurag Shah is our CEO. He's on top of being a wonderful human being. He's a fantastic CEO in the way that we push through the challenging times within COVID because we have a huge India presence. Obviously, they're going through a tough time right now over in India. There's a lot of things that we have to work through. But I think it just shows the grit and determination of agents, of tech partners to be able to get through this together. We're all going to come out fantastic on the backside.
--:-- Ron Schroer: I look at the relationships, and that's the most important thing. We would not be in the spot we are right now without people like you, without Chris Paradiso, without guys like Andrew Ryan and Jack Hurtvik and Matt Namoli. I'm going to leave some people out and I don't want to. There's so many wonderful people that have helped us get to the spot we are. We've got a lot of great things that are going to be coming out here soon too.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It's funny. I was talking to somebody and they were referring to the group of people that has started to go to those meetings in Boston as the Paradiso Mafia. He's like the crime boss of this insurance underworld family where everyone just gets together. I learned this a lot during my Trusted Choice days, for better or for worse. I'd say in general it's probably in that positive. The Big I, the national association works very similar. People spend time together, they do deals together, they refer people to each other, and they develop relationships and they know they can to some extent trust each other.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I don't know that I necessarily understood it at first. I actually had a really good conversation on this show with Sheffy Ben Huda, who I'm an enormous fan of. You can go back and listen to the episode, but we had this amazing conversation around how there are still many deals done in our industry, two old white guys in the back of a bar with a glass of whiskey, talking about nothing, but talking about everything at the same time. She was like, "You know, I hate that that's still the way the industry works." I said, "I hate that it still is two old fat white guys, but I don't mind that the industry works that way." Remove the racial profile and physical and age profile of that human. The fact that there still needs to be a high degree of trust in order for me to do business with you, I think is very important. Yes, it slows things down, but unlike so many other industries, and this is definitely an evolved thought of mine, it's not the way that I've always believed. The pace of our industry, while frustrating at times, it also keeps us successful. We don't have one of our largest carriers like Bear Stearns just crashing to the ground, obliterated, gone. That doesn't happen in a really long time. A lot of it is because of the pace that we move at and because you really have to trust each other. You really have to have gone through the gauntlet a little bit and earned it before people will bring you into these inner conversations. I think it's important. Speaking to your relationship side, I don't think those things will ever go away.
--:-- Ron Schroer: I don't think any of us want that to go away too. I do like that now you are starting to see a lot more diversification of people in senior leadership roles. We work with a lot of fantastic people across the board now, from carriers, from brokerages to agencies, so on and so forth. Going back to Sheffy and obviously her and Avi with what they do to be able to make people more informed of what's happening within the industry, Coverage is fantastic. Those two are tapped in like no other. It's great every single night. I look forward to 7:45, 8:00 getting that email about what's happening. It is really nice that all of us have access to people like this that are informed, that are influential, that can really help us all just get better. Because that's what it's about, man. Let's just be as efficient as possible at getting better. Like you mentioned before, everyone's been pretty freaking successful doing what they've done for the longest time. But it's like, "Hey, how can I build this out to where it's going to be long term scaling growth, succession planning, and so on?" That's why the industry is awesome too. Regardless of what people think about what's going to happen from an economic climate standpoint, it's about as recession proof of an industry as you get.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I know every time I start to get frustrated by the news, and obviously anyone who regularly listens to this show has a decent feel of my politics, I always just come back to the fact that we're in basically a recession proof, inflation proof business. I don't think we should discount that. If you're working in this space, I think it's important to remind yourself that while philosophically I disagree with almost everything that comes out of the current administration's mouth, almost. I am very pro-diversity. I don't particularly care for some of the ways they go about it, but I do think that in that particular regard, their heart is in the right place, hopefully. Monetarily, I think they're bonkers. My wife said to me the other day, she goes, "If they tax the shit out of us, all that's going to happen is insurance premiums are going to go up and we're going to net out at basically the same inflation adjusted income as anyone else." That's crappy for other industries for sure, because not everyone has that. But for us, I think we should at least occasionally take stock of the fact that we are blessed in that regard.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So okay, moving on. I want to talk about Donna and Arius in particular. You mentioned India. You guys have also proven in Israel too, am I correct about that?
--:-- Ron Schroer: We have a good bit of clients that are across the board in there, but the majority of what we do is held within some of the largest carriers in the world in their India branches too as well from that Crux product.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I just wanted to make sure that was accurate. It doesn't matter. Okay, cool. So one of the things that immediately turned me on was this idea of the sentiment score. In some of the promos and in some of the times I've mentioned the product in the middle of conversations, I've talked about sentiment. But I'd love to get it from you. What is the sentiment score? Why is this really a game-changing aspect of understanding our client base that maybe we haven't seen in previous data analytics products?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I think that was one of the things that drew me to be able to join this organization too, or to want to join this organization, because it is a very unique perspective as far as how we utilize the data. So I'm actually going to backtrack a little bit and give you a little more context on the India team and some of our carriers and how we got to the point with Donna too.
--:-- Ron Schroer: Because Aureus, you know, in my prior days at RiskMatch, we worked primarily with the data that was held just within an agency management system from like a client policy level detail standpoint. Again, just uncover transparency of what you have. But from an Aureus perspective, that data is vitally important to what we do from an independent agency side, but it's not the only piece of data that we bring in. So we bring in structured data sources like that agency management system or other systems they operate on, but also unstructured data. So some of that stuff that you have from activities and all these things that happen from a CRM perspective, voice, email, chat, interactions, surveys and testimonials.
--:-- But if you think about an agency's tech stack, and I mentioned that connected ecosystem getting together, getting closer to a point of that, we take that information on all the clients from each one of those systems and tie it all into one spot for you. Because if you think about those systems, there's some fantastic information to glean from each one of those individually, but tying it together is the tough part. So what we do with that data is we work primarily with existing customers, establish that customer journey, and that's how we're able to generate what's called Centimeter. So it's "sentiment meter," kind of a play on words, and that's the sentiment score.
--:-- So what we do with that Centimeter score, zero to 100 scale, and it follows every event, interaction, and transaction that happens with an end customer since the inception of their first policy. And the unique thing about that is it gives you real-time insight as of today. If Ryan has been my customer since July 2015, there's a weighted effect off of a policy transaction, a billing transaction, a survey, a testimonial, a conversation that I have with you. Whether it's positive or negative, the outcome of that. And we've processed over 60 million insurance policies with this sentiment algorithm. And it gets smarter and smarter as we go because of the volume of policy.
--:-- So we can start to infer what's Ryan most likely to do next based off of his past behavior right now. And then be able to give you that forward looking view. "Okay, Ryan is in a good spot with us on the zero to 100 scale as of today. I need to go sell him. He's a commercialized client. I got to go sell him a cyber policy right now or commercial crime policy. He's my personalized client as well." And we bring in third party data to allow you to learn a lot more about Ryan as a consumer. So we can start to say, "Hey, Ryan owns a boat. He has two other houses that he's not writing with you as an agent. This is something you need to bring up during your renewal conversation. And he's happy as hell with you right now. That's the best time to engage."
--:-- So what we want to do is just point you in the direction. Where do I have the highest likelihood to close more business with this specific customer? And then on the flip side, if I have customers that seem like they're starting to trend downwards on that Centimeter scale that they might churn out, what are some of the things that we can do to get them back up to a spot to where we can start expanding that relationship with them? So if you look at our competitive landscape, we have business intelligence by the nature of the data we pull in. So let you know exactly what you have. Then we run a ton of predictive models to say, "What can we sell? How can we retain to this customer?" But then when you put that Centimeter score on top of that, that's when you get real precise. It was as far as, "Hey, these are the customers that I know I can go after over the next 90 days."
--:-- And I think that's such a unique mix of what we do. And then the flexibility of our platform and workflow is so inherently important to every single agency. And we are getting to the point where we're connected to all these different tech partners—Tarmika, Rocket Referrals. We're going to be set up with Lightspeed and Agency Zoom and Cotter Group. The majority of the agency management systems we're set up with, because what we want to do is push that insight into whatever environment our customers want to consume it in, because we want to be an enhancement of what they're doing right now. I don't want to be another step in a workflow. So as much as I love Donna, she's the greatest thing that we've done at this point, it comes down to I want to know the sentiment score of my customers and I want to know what can I do with them today.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: [To audience] What's up guys? Sorry to take you away from the episode, but as you know, we do not run ads on this show and in exchange for that, I need your help. If you're loving this episode, if you enjoy this podcast, whether you're watching on YouTube or you're listening on your favorite podcast platform, I would love for you to subscribe, share, comment if you're on YouTube. Leave a rating review if you're on Spotify or Apple iTunes. This helps the show grow. It helps me bring more guests in. We have a tremendous lineup of people coming in, men and women who've done incredible things, sharing their stories around peak performance, leadership, growth, sales, the things that are going to help you grow as a person and grow your business. But they all check out comments, ratings, reviews. They check out all this information before they come on. So as I reach out to more and more people and want to bring them in and share their stories with you, I need your help. Share the show. Subscribe if you're not subscribed. And I'd love for you to leave a comment about the show because I read all the comments. Or if you're on Apple or Spotify, leave a rating review of this show. I love you for listening to this show. And I hope you enjoy listening as much as I do creating the show for you. All right, I'm out of here. Peace. Let's get back to the episode.
--:-- [Returns to conversation]
--:-- Yeah, so there's a lot to unpack in there. And I mean in a good way. So the first thing that came to my mind was independent agencies' core value proposition is service, right? That's their core value proposition: "We have real people who care about you, who are going to treat you right. We're going to take care of you, make sure you're set up properly." Okay, so if we can all buy into that being, in some degree, the core value proposition of an independent agency, then I look at Net Promoter Score and I say that's a wonderful tool. But it is a random snapshot in time, six to nine months after an interaction, after a policy purchase. And I get that Rocket Referrals has done a great job of really dialing in Net Promoter Score. So this is not a knock on Net Promoter Score, but it gives you a general, maybe 15,000 foot view. If your gut is like 10 miles up, then you have Net Promoter Score, which maybe gets you in the atmosphere and you're maybe 30,000 feet from where your people are.
--:-- When I look at Centimeter, I'm like, I am literally on the ground. This is giving me boots on the ground understanding of exactly what's happening. Because someone sends a—and maybe I want to talk a little bit about some of the things that are coming with the Lightspeed voice integration. We can dig into emails and texts and phone transcripts and stuff like that. But just kind of jumping ahead and then we'll get back to what it actually means. Like I can have a billing change and then receive an email. And based on what the person was saying in that email, after a billing change, we can tell that billing change didn't go very well. So we're getting an impact on the Centimeter score because it's the second time they had to do something with their bill, which may produce a negative or whatever. I'm kind of estimating. I don't know the algorithm. But the language that they're using around those requests is showing us as well. And that drops the Centimeter score down.
--:-- Now, as an agency owner or the leader of the customer success team or retention team, wherever you sit in the organization, there's no way for you to know that particular client in that moment. Maybe they send you an email. God forbid they go out to Google and change their Google review, or some amount of months later, you get a Net Promoter Score change. With Centimeter, all of a sudden you could get an update right inside your email or inside your dashboard that goes, "Hey, this person just had a problem. Yesterday, their Centimeter score just dropped 15 points overnight. You should probably reach out to them and see what's going on." And now you can get ahead of that problem, see what's going on, solve it. And even better, go back into your organization and go, "Why did this happen? How do we make sure this doesn't happen again?" And that's the—when I think about that process, I'm like, this allows us to actually deliver as close to 100% of what our true value proposition is as possible. And that's when I saw this, I was like, this is brilliant. This is the solution.
--:-- Ron Schroer: I couldn't agree more, man. And that's absolutely awesome. And again, the Net Promoter Score is very important to what we do, and I'll just kind of talk about that with like Rocket Referrals. And I think down the line once we get Agency Zoom with it with the Google reviews and everything else, because it is at a point in time like you said. It could be six months ago and it's with a very small segment of your customers, so you're missing a huge base of your customers. But when you look at digesting that text of a testimonial—if I'm writing a review or if Rocket Referrals is doing that testimonial, we take a look at what is that language in that. If I say, "Hey, Rogue Risk, I got my renewal, the renewal rate was incredibly too high, I needed them to remarket, they were slow to get back to me," all those little words that are joined together are taken a look at, and that's obviously going to drive a sentiment score down.
--:-- But what we want to do is—people are making decisions across their organization based off of a small segment of their client base, and then based on a point in time, when you have access to look at a high level across large sets of your clients. But when you are down with boots on the ground, like you mentioned, an account manager, I need to make sure that we're being able to provide an opportunity to delight our customers and turn every event that you have with that customer into an opportunity, whether that event you're in right now is a negative one or a positive one. Because I think, as you know, we all have had personal relationships and business relationships that have gone through their ups and downs. It's just the natural part of life. But when you can keep a close eye on exactly when that happens, it does tie straight back to exactly what you said: that agency's value prop. We have service. We are accountable. And this is what we can do to make sure that we hang on to these best clients that are going to be profitable for us and we can grow with.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So that kind of brings us into this idea. So I just described what I believe is like the fully baked perfect scenario of how this works. A big part of that is this concept, and I think it's a term that anyone who's listening to podcasts like this one and some of the others in the industry, maybe even some others just in the marketing and sales space in general, you're starting to hear this term "unstructured data." So what is the difference between structured data and unstructured data? And when I think about unstructured data, I think about reading the text of an email or a text message or breaking down the transcript of a phone call. Can you just define those two terms for us as best as possible? And then start to talk a little bit about how you guys are using unstructured data in the Donna tool.
--:-- Ron Schroer: Yeah, I mean, you actually explained it perfectly. So it's those types of data that are out there with unstructured pieces. So voice, email, text, even to the point of when you've got a ton of information on Excel reports that you can dump in, that we have to go in once we grab that data, we can kind of pick in place whatever client it belongs to and so on, as long as there's a unique identifier that ties into that client. But the structured data comes from those systems where we get connections set up, whether it be via API or VPN or however, and it comes through in a very formatted process. I mentioned kind of client policy level detail fields from an agency management system. So those are those things that we can just get recurring. The unstructured data is like a giant pile of—I don't want to call it garbage—a giant pile of stuff that's out there that we are going to organize for you and place it where it needs to go so you can get the best insight out of it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So how is Donna taking that? Like, it just seems to me—I guess my question would be, if I didn't understand this, my next question would be like, "Okay, so how are you getting any usefulness out of the transcript of a phone call that my CSR has with one of my clients? How does that turn into something that Donna then gives me that I can use? What is that? How does that work?"
--:-- Ron Schroer: Exactly. And I think that's what's important with us getting tapped into the voice customers, because we've done this a lot with our India customers. We have the ability to, once we get that text recorded, get it transcribed to natural English. We run it through our algorithms and everything else too, because we run it through English dictionaries, then on top of insurance dictionaries at the same time, because the word "garage" means something different in personal lines than it does elsewhere. So from stuff like that, we take out and then we look at those adjoining words. I kind of use that example with you. If I call and say, "Hey, my premium is way too high. I need you to remarket, or I'm going to leave the agency." You take a look at some of those words that I did. We generate a Centimeter score off that too. And it's kind of like passive detractor, that type of information is coming out. And that's what's going to be able to affect that score, drive it up or down based off that information. So it's actually a really clean process. It seems like Jetsons-type stuff everyone talks about, but it is pretty efficient. We just get hooked up to companies that can just record it and then we transcribe it and get it rolling.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, I'm really excited about that. Because again, thinking about this from a scaled managerial standpoint, and I've had people say like, "What the hell are you doing with a tool like Donna? You have 200 clients. You can't be getting that." And the truth is, I'm getting stuff out of Donna. But this to me, and I've said this from the very beginning since the first day—one, you guys are our sponsor of the show, but I also pay for Donna. I write a check to you guys and it's one of the biggest investments I've made in the agency. And it was one of my best and smartest in my opinion, because what I'm establishing and what I believe is that this type of insight and analytics, if I can have it baked into the culture of my agency from day one, it's going to—my team, how we handle customers, how we build process, how we think through the way we want to do things—will be based not just on our gut feel, which I do think is important. It's important to follow what you think is going to work, but then to be able to validate that with actual statistics.
--:-- And when I look at something like—we're eventually going to have, hopefully if things go well, a large inside sales force. That's great. What if I can see that the sentiment score for Tammy three months after she signs a customer is through the roof? Every one of her customers has a 90 sentiment score after she sold a policy. Maybe I should go spend some time with Tammy, even if her numbers aren't the best. Maybe Tammy's not the number two or three on the list every month, but her sentiment score is through the roof. So I think traditionally, what we would do is go, "Just tell me who's the best salesperson and I'm going to follow what they do." But now it's giving us a whole other layer to say, not just what are they doing from a volume perspective, but what is the actual experience that your customers are getting? Maybe Tammy is setting expectations better. Maybe she's just friendlier. Maybe she's a better problem solver. Maybe she understands the market better. Maybe she sells a few less policies, but her sentiment score is off the charts. So it's little things like that that I look at and I'm like, this is how you manage an insurance business moving forward. It enhances our connection to humans. It doesn't detract from our connection to the human.
--:-- Ron Schroer: It certainly does. Now, we've had a couple of clients that have looked at it from that view too. Like, "I want to use this as a tool for my team to understand what good processes look like." But I think back a couple of weeks ago, I was on Heath Sheeran's town hall meetings and I was on there with Justin and Caitlin Egger. They were talking through and they had a pretty unique perspective from a sales standpoint or a service standpoint: let's make sure they were writing good business. Because sales is one thing. You can churn out sales like no other, but you want good, thoughtful, sticky business that's not going to crush your loss ratios, your combined ratios, that's going to stay with you, that's going to be profitable. And I don't want to say "easy to work with," but to allow you to be able to keep those customers and delight them. And I think utilizing Donna from that lens, we see a lot because we're looking at cross portfolios of account managers—whose book of business looks like what as compared to others. And I just think that's a really nice way from a coaching standpoint, but also from a replication standpoint from you as an agency on the operations side to say, "Hey, we need to figure out what these couple people are doing correct and make sure that we start to build out processes in place so everybody is in line with the expectations so we can make sure we're hanging on to our best customers."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's awesome. Another thing that you guys are doing that I'm a big fan of, and I think technology providers in general have to have an open mind to this, because I think the prevailing attitude, maybe even as recently as a few years ago, would be, "I want everybody in my ecosystem. How many logins? How much engagement? How much time are they spending in my system?" And you guys have taken a very interesting approach that I have a tremendous amount of respect for and think is the appropriate approach in general, which is: we don't care if they ever log in. And the reason is because we're going to take our information and make it available in the systems that they're using every day. And that's why the integration, which I know isn't live yet but is in the works, hopefully, with some of the agency management systems and with Agency Zoom potentially. The idea—and I'm talking future state to a certain extent because it's not live yet—but the idea that your sentiment score, say it goes down, whatever your trigger is, 10 points, 12 points, 15 points, you as the agency owner get a task or a notification immediately sent to you that says this happened. And an email gets fired off or a text gets fired off to that customer in that exact moment that says, "Hey, I've become aware that something may have happened or there was an interaction that didn't go particularly well, and I would love 10 minutes of your time just to learn what happened so I can understand."
--:-- Even if the person doesn't take you up on it, it changes their disposition towards the agency because now you as the owner, you as a business leader, are putting yourself out in front. And these are just some of the little things that you can do. Maybe if it drops substantially, you put them in a whole new pipeline where you have a team of people who are restoking the flames of love for your agency. Some crazy thing like that. But that's their job, or a certain person's job in your business is to jump into these clients who have sentiment scores with major drops and fix the problem. That type of connection to the data is where I think this becomes real-world applicable for every agency and is a true driver of success.
--:-- Ron Schroer: I 1000% agree. And I think the biggest thing is make it actionable, like you just said. And I think that with some of these opportunities that we have to work with some of these tech partners to get to that point—because everyone asks us, because we have a lot of different options of what we could do as a company with a product. "Do you guys want to be a CRM? Do you want to be a marketing company? Do you want to be an agency management system?" And the answer is hell no. There are so many people that do all that better than us. We are really good at understanding data and being able to give you really strong insights based off that data. And I look at that opportunity with Agency Zoom and running those trigger events and making our insights actionable. Because what we do is we learn a lot from the recommendations that we make.
--:-- So regardless of somebody spending 15 minutes at a clip within the actual Donna platform, the most important thing that we have is we've processed—we've got roughly a little under $2 billion of data that we process just within Donna, not to mention our legacy platform Crux that works a lot with carriers. And that number is continually growing every single month. But we help our users have the chance to let us know, "Hey, was this recommendation a good one? Was this one a little bit off base?" And it gets smarter and smarter as we go. And not to get too much on the technical side, but the machine learning piece and the feedback from our customers—it's just like the Facebook stuff, thumbs up, "Hey, you like this?" or Twitter or whatever it might be. It's going to help everything we do get stronger, but also help the end result get stronger with our tech partners to push this stuff out into these other ecosystems and that agency's own piece.
--:-- I can't speak highly enough of Mo and Tolga and Kat and that team over there with what they've done to be able to build out their product, but their relationships with their agencies and what they're doing. And on top of that, some of the other partners that we're all connected with—and I hate to use the word "incestuous," but Ryan, every single tech partner that we all work with has got the same clients, the same advisors. And it's just so much fun. And we're all close friends, all the executive leadership teams of the companies too. It's pretty great to be a part of.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It was funny. I got accused the other day of being in a clique. "You're in the clique." And I was like, "Well, if by clique you mean I've worked for 16 years to establish trusted and respected partnerships with people that I know aren't going to screw me and I'm not going to screw them, then yes. I'm in a clique." But it's like, okay. It's not like I have a popular Instagram channel and that's how I got in. It's funny to me. I think what is really cool about what you just said, and it is funny how the mismatch and crisscross, but what happens is—and this is the truth, guys, if you're listening at home—when you find someone that you know you can do business with, and they're going to be honest with you, they're going to be respectful, they're going to be trustworthy, even if they disagree with you, even if they disagree with the project or aren't interested in the project, they're going to give you that feedback. That's a valuable thing. And probably one of the most valuable things that exists.
--:-- Because if you were to look at my bank account on a daily basis, you would not say that I'm wealthy. But I believe that the connections I have—I am. I can call you on the phone and say, "Hey man, have you seen this thing? What do you think about this thing? I'm considering it, but I'm not really sure." And you'll be like, "You know what, for this maybe, but for you, I don't think so." And I can get off that phone call and go, "I know he wasn't trying to push me in this direction or that for his own wellbeing. He was doing it because he wants me to be successful and because he has insights into something." And those kinds of relationships are so incredibly important. And it's fun today being where I was back in 2014, 2015, kind of looking out over the industry at TrustedChoice.com and Agency Nation and seeing so much turmoil, a lot of fighting and jockeying for position. And I feel like today, a lot of that is over, or at least most of it. And what's happening is all these like-minded companies and people are coming together and starting to build real solutions. And it just makes me so happy to see it because it's good for everybody.
--:-- Ron Schroer: It absolutely does. And in this industry, it's not for the faint of heart at all. And I look at the last handful of years, but especially the last couple, with the relationships that we've been able to build—again, like yourself with Paradiso and Amoli and all these people, Bradley Flowers and those guys down there. And what I love is that when any single one of us picks up the phone and calls, 99% chance that phone's getting picked up right away. And we can talk through stuff. I mean, you and I text back and forth about all kinds of industry-relevant things, technologies and whatnot. That's my favorite part about what gets me up: the relationships and what we're doing right now to make the industry a better place. And I love the transparency of someone telling me, "Hey, Ron, you're totally off base on this."
--:-- I look at a guy like Mike Cormier, who I worked for at RiskMatch. This guy was the CEO of Marsh's Risk Consulting Business. So he would just go out and buy companies for Marsh left and right. He's seen a lot through the transactional side of things too. But I sit there and kind of vent to him sometimes about things. And he just basically tells me, "No, you're in the wrong, man. Here's the way you need to think about it." And you need people like that, versus everyone just saying, "Yeah, keep going, buddy. You're doing good."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That was me this morning. I was having a moment and I was texting with Amoli and he just picked up the phone and called me and was like, "Look, this is the way it is. Suck it up. And here's how—here you go." And you just need that sometimes.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You just need someone to like, just like, it's almost like you need a slap across the face. Like, okay, hey, you had your moment to bitch, now it's time to get back to work.
--:-- Ron Schroer: And you also learn who not to do business with. You learn that guy can't be trusted, or she's gonna, you know, you gotta watch out. That is just as important. I think people discount that because it's just as important to know who's a good person as someone who's gonna hose you up. Because once you've hosed one person up, you're highly likely to do it again. You put your reputation online, you put money on the line, you put your time, your capital, your friendships on the line. And if you do that with the wrong person, you can get in trouble. So it's a safety net as well, and it's important.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Well, you mentioned Amoli. That guy has a way about himself. If anybody has not had a chance to listen to him talk, I suggest hopping on some of his podcasts, his prior ones and stuff too. But he is what you just said. I talk to him as much as anybody. He has a way to be able to put things in perspective and a way to communicate very effectively. I swear to God, him and I are really unique because we're the same age, played college athletics, we both owned gyms at the same time. We're just very in line with each other where we're at in our lives, both have a couple of kids and everything else. Every time I see his number come up on my phone, I enjoy every minute of it. That guy is as tapped in as anybody as far as what's going on in the industry, but he's one of the best fricking people you'll ever meet. Him, Paradiso, and yourself. You guys are all about paying it forward and helping everyone get to that spot that they want to be. And that's what you said in the last handful of years—it's gotten so much better because the industry is heading that direction right now.
--:-- Ron Schroer: Well, man, I want to be respectful of your time. As we've gotten to know each other, I obviously think incredibly highly of you as a person. I think what's going on with the company that you represent, DONNA, is a best-in-class tool in our space. This probably sounds promotional to some people, but I don't give a shit because it's what I think. I had Rags on the podcast too, and we did the same thing for Tarmika. These are the tools that I use every day. They are the core, not just usage-wise, but the tools you use create, in some parts, the philosophy behind which you build your agency. If you use a certain type of tool or are represented by a certain company, that is an indication of what you believe and who you are. To put data and analytics and the usage of it, and what it represents to our customer experience, to put that at the core of Rogue—I couldn't be happier in our partnership. I couldn't be happier to be a user. I just think the world of what you're doing. I hope everyone who listens at least goes and gets the demo, at least hits the website, checks it out, gets the socials in your ecosystem. Just so you can know—that's what I said about Tarmika—just know what's going on. Maybe now's not the right time. That's perfectly fine. Maybe never is the right time. But I do think it's important to know what you guys are doing because I think you're going to be a player for a long time in the space. Some of the best in the business will be using you. It just makes me happy to be able to share it with the audience.
--:-- Ron Schroer: And Ron, again, I can't thank you enough for your friendship and partnership, and the opportunity to be on the show. I'm more than happy to speak to anybody that wants to learn more from that perspective too. But I really appreciate everything you're doing for us, and on top of that, all the other companies that you're involved with. You're doing some great things, man. Much appreciated on that end too.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Thank you. Where do people go if they want to get in touch with you or learn more about DONNA? Where's the best spot for that?
--:-- Ron Schroer: Yeah, so on donnaforagents.com. It's DONNA, spelled F-O-R, agents.com. They can go on and watch a demo. You can communicate with us through that channel. The emails will come directly to me. If you need to chat with me directly, my email is ron at ariasanalytics.com. And if you need to talk to Ryan, my cell phone number will be readily available too. I'm more than happy to have conversations with anybody that's interested.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That would be great. Awesome, man. Well, hey, appreciate you, man. Be good.
--:-- Ron Schroer: All right. Thanks, man. You too. Cheers.
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