Impact Achievement Group’s Service Advantage™ Series Helps Farmers Insurance

SEATTLE – June 25, 2007 – Impact Achievement Group’s new Service Advantage™ training program is helping Farmers Life Insurance focus on its key customer group – Farmers’ agents.

Impact Achievement recently launched the 2007 version of its customer service and loyalty workshop series at Farmers Life Insurance’s Seattle-based regional support center. Farmers Life is part of the nation’s third largest insurance group, The Farmers Group of Companies, with more than 18,000 employees. Farmers sees significant growth potential in the life insurance market by leveraging its nationwide network of auto and homeowners insurance agents.

"We want to be a leader in the life insurance market, and want our agents to feel comfortable and confident that they have the best company behind them," said Harris Mortensen, Farmers Director, Life Insurance Operations. "The Service Advantage™ training provides us a fresh perspective on how important our customers are, and builds our skills to effectively serve them."

Mortensen added that Farmers wants to make it an exceptional "post-sale" experience – providing problem-free and complete service that motivates agents to repeat their effort and even refer other agents.

The Service Advantage Workshop™ Series is a comprehensive program designed to teach and reinforce proven skills that convey organizational commitment to customer service. The Seattle call center is also implementing a customized template of Impact Achievement Group’s Harrison Assessment System™ that provides a validated profile for selection and development of the best Farmers’ customer service representatives to support the agents.

The training is based on a simple premise: regardless of the products and services a company provides, their customer's experience is defined and differentiated by the front line employees who deliver those services, through "the eyes of the customer".

The Service Advantage Solutions Series combines two proven, practical workshops: Creating Exceptional Customer Experiences™ and Managing Service Performance™, accompanied by the blended reinforcement "Shortcut™ Series. The first workshop trains frontline workers to appreciate the value of serving customers, both for the organization and themselves. The training recognizes that while these workers and managers have the capability, they often lack knowledge, perspective, proper attitude and the framework to provide exceptional service performance.

In Managing Service Performance, leaders learn performance management competencies to integrate the human touch in customer service. They learn how to listen to their customers’ "voice", create customer scorecards, remove barriers to customer satisfaction and provide flexibility to meet various customer demands. They also learn to motivate and recognize the behavior that reliably meets customer expectations.

Impact Achievement’s Harrison Assessment System is a versatile tool used for employee selection, coaching, team development and succession planning. It contains 50 generic templates, including roles like supervisors, managers, customer service, and sales personnel. Farmers Life call center representatives all took the Harrison to help determine the profile for model performers. Integrating this validated research template with their selection process, Farmers can hire the call center candidates most likely to succeed.

Farmers Life is leveraging Impact Achievement’s Shortcuts™, a blended series of engaging video vignettes and reinforcement activities. Trainers and managers can conduct 10-20 minute "huddles" to discuss how they can continually apply the training principles learned in the workshop series.

"Farmers Life was committed to transforming their customer experience—not just conducting traditional training," said Lee Klepinger, Impact Achievement Group founder and president. "They were an ideal customer for us to implement a comprehensive series for assessing, training, coaching, motivating and reinforcing learning."

About Impact Achievement Group

Impact Achievement Group provides assessment, coaching, customer loyalty and leadership development training that focuses on employee selection, retention, employee engagement and customer engagement. By integrating and blending the world's best assessment and recruiting processes, workshops and eLearning training, coaching and measurement programs, Impact Achievement Group helps organizations improve human performance to achieve bottom line results.