24 June 2025

How Independent Agencies Can Tackle Staffing Shortages While Growing Their Business

We are in a hard market, especially for small and mid-sized independent insurance agencies. On top of wider economic issues, many smaller insurance agencies are faced with staffing shortages, as experienced agents retire and the competition for new talent increases. This can have knock-on effects on small agency efficiency, leaving them struggling to balance service quality while still fostering growth.

Unless the right strategies are in place, these staffing gaps can lead to slow quote turnarounds and missed revenue opportunities. Not to mention declining customer satisfaction. How can small agencies better thrive in a fast-paced and competitive insurance environment? Luckily, there are ways for insurance agencies to grow without hiring and tools to help small insurance agencies scale without being held back by staffing issues.

The Growing Impact of Insurance Agency Staffing Shortages

It’s easy to underestimate staffing crises, especially as a smaller agency. It’s more than an inconvenience, however, as it can seriously impact your growth and ability to serve your customers. Recent industry reports highlight the growing issue of understaffing, primarily affecting smaller players, and show how these increased workloads lead to job dissatisfaction, poorer outcomes, and burnout.

In fact, a recent report shows that, while 76% of insurance employers wish to hire over the next year, 52% of them see the biggest challenge as a shortage of applicants with relevant skills, highlighting the issues of “aging out” and failing to attract younger talent to replace them. Plus, burnout raises its head again – up to 60% of insurance workers may be planning to switch jobs just to escape heavy workloads.

It’s not set to get better, either. Within the next decade and a half, it’s expected that 50% of the insurance workforce will retire, leaving 400,000 open positions in the US alone. With larger agencies able to offer perks and compensation packages, such as remote work flexibility that smaller agencies will struggle to match, this will have a disproportionate effect on them.

With these factors in play, we see effects like:

Quote turnaround times rising from hours to days.
Reduced capacity to seek out new business.
Customer service delays impacting retention rates.
Higher error rates as remaining staff struggle to keep up.
Increasing workloads on agents disincentivizing new staffing.

For agency owners and leaders, these staffing constraints lead to a painful choice. Should you focus on maintaining service quality for your existing customers? Or pursue growth opportunities and risk customer dissatisfaction? It’s a choice no business wants to face. And you don’t have to.

Fortunately, small agency efficiency is possible. With smart insurance automation and quoting automation, P&C agency growth and efficient insurance operations are simpler than you may think.

Doing More With Less: Solutions for Insurance Agency Staffing

The tools to help small insurance agencies scale are already out there. With the right insurance automation, small agency efficiency is very much achievable. Let’s take a closer look at some key tools and strategies that can help address this staffing crunch efficiently and effectively.

Automate Manual Tasks and Streamline Operations

Insurance automation offers an immediate solution for understaffed agencies. When you can identify and eliminate repetitive manual tasks, you are free to redirect your valuable staff time towards revenue-generating activities.

There are several high-impact insurance automation opportunities to take advantage of:

Certificate of insurance generation and delivery
Policy information verification and pre-fill
Multi-carrier quoting and proposal development
Routine customer communications and follow-ups

The most forward-looking agencies are already using quoting automation platforms to reduce their quote processing time. One leading insurer that worked with bolt, for example, was able to vastly expand its agent network (by 300% in 5 years) while still keeping customer service high.

Digital tools let a single team member handle unprecedented quote volumes and vastly simplify the quote process through integrated quoting platforms, directly addressing insurance agency staffing challenges.

Use Technology to Do More with Less

There’s a lot more that technology can assist with besides quoting automation, too. AI-powered tools now offer sophisticated task processing that can greatly boost small agency efficiency, including:

Lead scoring and prioritization systems that direct staff to the highest-value opportunities
Renewal management platforms that identify at-risk accounts and suggest retention strategies
Document processing systems that extract, organize, and analyze policy information

Using these tools in your insurance operations lets agencies keep high service standards even when staffing limitations are at play. In the leading insurer example above, this platform gave them the capacity to handle over 20,000 daily quotes every day of the year. Smaller operations may even see greater impact from insurance automation.

Rethink Your Talent Strategy

While insurance automation has a strong role to play in addressing insurance agency staffing issues, human capital is still essential to a thriving agency. If constraints are impacting your ability to attract quality talent, consider these strategies:

Flexible staffing models, including part-time professionals, contract workers, and virtual assistants
Cross-training team members to create redundancy in critical functions
Developing stronger onboarding programs to accelerate new hire productivity
Creating mentorship structures to transfer institutional knowledge from veterans to newcomers

Sometimes, hiring a professional from an insurance-adjacent industry will bring fresh perspectives and new skills to the table. Meanwhile, hybrid work models offer you the ability to recruit outside your geographic limits without needing applicants to uproot their lives, significantly broadening your talent pool. Getting your experienced agents invested in passing skills to the next generation also helps you to retain institutional knowledge and ensure efficiency in new hires.

How bolt Empowers Small Agency Efficiency

For both large and small agencies navigating the insurance agency staffing crisis, bolt’s platform offers a comprehensive way to boost your operational efficiency and foster agency growth. Our simple-to-initiate, cloud-based, and single API solution addresses the most pressing challenges in insurance operations.

Real-Time Multi-Carrier Quoting

Generate quotes across multiple carriers simultaneously. This reduces the time and expertise needed while still generating accurate, competitive quotes. Quoting automation, complete with data-backed pre-fills to simplify the process, helps you improve response times to prospective customers without needing to onboard new staff.

Seamless Integrations and Centralized Management

bolt helps small agencies eliminate the need to juggle multiple systems by integrating directly with popular agency management software and prefill services. With everything connected in one platform, from quoting and binding to lead tracking and document management, agents save time, reduce errors, and stay organized. This centralized experience is especially valuable for lean teams, allowing them to manage higher volumes without adding complexity or overhead.

Automated Renewal Workflows

bolt’s renewal workflow automation lets you identify upcoming renewals and streamline the renewal process. This keeps the admin burden on your team low while maintaining strong retention rates, saving hours per week on basic renewal-related tasks through insurance automation.

Through bolt’s platform, you can effectively integrate insurance automation into your operations, helping you gain access to more carriers and simplify your workflows without growing your agent headcount.

Actionable Steps to Address Insurance Agency Staffing

Despite the challenging staffing environment, especially for smaller agencies, you can still thrive.

Conduct a workflow audit to identify the most time-consuming manual processes in your agency
Evaluate comparative raters and digital quote engines to reduce quote processing time
Implement a customer portal like bolt’s to shift routine service requests to self-service channels
Explore bolt’s platform capabilities to see how our integrated insurance automation solutions can better support your specific needs

Remember, insurance automation isn’t just about efficiency, although it delivers that too. Automation offers valuable tools to help small insurance agencies scale and grow, no matter what insurance operations headaches they’re facing. If you’re willing to embrace technology and optimize your operations, you’re setting yourself up to thrive, even in a hard market.

bolt is here to help your agency do more with less. Book a demo today to see how we can streamline your operations and support your growth – even with a lean team.

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