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The insurance industry has long relied on referrals from insurance salespeople as its primary marketing channel. From the legal perspective, insurance agents act as a representative for their insured clients. With the emergence of multi-media marketing channels, such as telemarketing, bank marketing, web-marketing, TV shopping channels, and insurance technology, today’s insurance practitioners require high-quality consultation skills in order to service an increasing number of insured clients and meet their needs in this fiercely competitive market. The international insurance market is more advanced in service maturity, although in many countries, the insurance business is still principally marketed by brokers or agents. In Holland, an insurance agent is required to provide two or more insurance proposal reports for their insured clients as reference. According to Article 9 of Insurance Act, an insurance agent should take their clients’ best interest into consideration when helping the client make informed decisions in planning their insurance portfolios or signing any contracts. This way, insurance agents are able to provide innovative insurance products and make reasonable premium adjustments to meet their clients’ expectations, which simultaneously increase the competitiveness of the insurance product or scheme. Under this cooperative context, banks and insurance brokers have held sway over the insurance market: in 2016, 58% of premium income was created by banks and insurance brokers. Currently a rising focus is placed upon how to strengthen the organizational development and marketing channels of insurance-broker companies. The compensations paid to insurance brokers has increased in recent years, and the size of the sales force of large insurance-broker companies have outnumbered that of small-and-medium insurance companies. The Financial Supervisory Commission has conducted a series of financial investigations into large insurance-broker companies, and demanded these firms stipulate regulations regarding their compensation system, which must be reported to the Commission. It is expected that the regulations in “organizational management and employee compensation” and “marketing promotion” can also be specified, so as to meet the standards of the Financial Supervisory Commission and their salespeople’s expectations. If the salespeople of these companies identify with the company’s management and compensation system, these companies will certainly benefit, and the interests of their clients will be better protected - a win-win situation. Needless to say, this will lead to growth for insurance-broker companies.
This study explores the organizational management, marketing promotion, and employee compensation of insurance-broker companies by distributing questionnaires among the staff of local insurance-broker firms. Valid returned questionnaires totaled 225. Upon performing factor analysis, we observed three factors that accounted for these insurance practitioners’ recognition of the firm’s organizational management, which were “awareness of salesman,” “enhancement of professional knowledge,” and “trustworthiness of corporate financial.” Their identification with the firm’s marketing promotion could be explained by two aspects: “corporate image” and “service for insured clients.” With regard to their identification with the firm’s employee compensation, two factors were identified: “actual compensation for salespeople’s performance” and “awareness of criteria for performance evaluation.” Empirical results indicate that the dimensions of “enhancement of professional knowledge,” “corporate image,” “actual compensation for salespeople’s performance,” and “awareness of criteria for performance evaluation” are what most insurance practitioners seek in an insurance-broker company. Among the above factors, “salespeople’s family background (number of family members),” “educational background,” and “staff size of organization,” are three critical factors that account for salespeople’s choosing an insurance-broker company. Empirical results revealed that those who have a bigger family to support or have lesser education tend to have a higher awareness of professional knowledge, as they hope to develop a wider array of marketing channels and a better corporate image, in order to increase their sales volume. This is also true for the factors “actual compensation for salespeople’s performance” and “organizational development.”
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