With 78 members in their virtual office, Kira and Brad Gainey have been building their insurance agency for the last 10 years and now have agents working from all over the US with 4 different time zones. Initially they were using different video call providers to keep everyone connected, but during the global pandemic, when everyone moved to the remote space, they started searching for a better way to collaborate for their team.
Finding a virtual office created an opportunity to be more accessible and to have a smoother experience when navigating virtual meetings. When people could just meet every day at the virtual office, they didn’t need to schedule long meetings or send out links, they could just work together and be available for one another.
Furthermore, since we met the team at Teemyco, we were surrounded by great culture and a lot of support. Everyone has been friendly, helpful, willing to get back quickly, troubleshoot with us and adapt. And that’s a lot of how we try to be at our agency too. We’re working in this old industry, but try to improve ways to work and adapt to nowaday realities, while keeping the most important part of the business at its core - people and the relationships with them.
As an insurance agency we have a lot of people being onboarded all the time. Teemyco has been playing a crucial part in streamlining the processes. When new people sign into the office on their first day at the agency, they already know where to go and where to search for information, because there are rooms dedicated to newcomers. These rooms also have all the necessary links attached to them with product information and important recordings.
While going through training, they’re always surrounded by experienced agents doing the work, so they can already imagine what their future will look like. It also empowers them to have conversations with the team in a more relaxed environment than scheduled calls.
The virtual office is also what helps to bring in the apprenticeship piece into their training, which is a crucial part of the insurance industry. People are able to see who’s available for questions and can discuss them at any time. This ensures not only the newcomers but also trained agents can grow into their roles quicker.
Since moving into a virtual office you’ll often see multiple agents coworking and building friendships. By the end of month 3, we already had 90 people in the office. They get to go through their challenges together and also celebrate each other for their wins. Having a platform where you have visibility into colleagues outside of scheduled meetings or webinars, provides a chance to interact more during the tough or the exciting times of your day or the week.
Communicating with people across different time zones has also been improved due to Teemyco. We can simply have the visibility on who’s in the office and spontaneously discuss the urgent matters.
Us, as the owners of the agency, we can interact with many more of our agents because we get to just jump into a room and say hi whenever we see an opportunity and it doesn’t have to be scheduled.
Just yesterday we had our national meeting streamed and we were able to watch it together with our team. We were chatting, laughing, participating in a poll and discussing the meeting that was running in the background. It was almost like we were all together physically.
It’s hard to describe how excited we are about Teemyco and what it’s done for us so far. We see the tendency of remote work in our industry and can see Teemyco staying a crucial asset to our business.