Johnson & Johnson: What It Takes To Be A Five-Star MGA

Johnson & Johnson, a family-owned and operated managing general agent (MGA), recently joined an elite club. The technology and service-driven firm was named an ‘All-Star Wholesale Partner’ by retail brokers who took part in Insurance Business America’s annual Five Star Wholesale Brokers & MGAs 2020 survey. This means Johnson & Johnson is succeeding in eight key areas: technical expertise and product knowledge; underwriting responsiveness and turnaround time; communication; range of products; claims support; compensation; technology; and marketing support.

“We’re delighted to have been named one of Insurance Business America’s Five-Star MGAs. It’s what we work for and work towards every day,” said Peter Burrous, chief marketing officer at Johnson & Johnson. “Everybody can say they have good service, but at the end of the day, it’s all in how your customer views your service. With the Five-Star MGA vote of confidence, we believe we are achieving our service goals. But it’s always a work in progress. We have a management meeting every Monday in which we evaluate and review our service standards to make sure we’re providing the service that we say we’re providing.”

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One service standard that ranks highly on the retail agent’s agenda is underwriting response and turnaround time. They want to turn a submission into a quote as quickly as possible, and they expect their wholesale partners to facilitate that. This need for speed is a true reflection of the world we live in today, where a consumer can log into Amazon.com, or a similar e-commerce platform, to buy a product in seconds.

“One of the things we’ve done to ensure we’re meeting our retail agents’ expectations is we’ve staffed accordingly,” Barrous told Insurance Business. “Technology or no technology, we must have a team that’s capable of achieving the goals and the expectations of our customers. Then combine that with the fact that we do all of our programming internally. It’s probably the more expensive way to go, but it allows us to be nimble, to be responsive, and to meet the expectations of our customers. We can do what we need to do to manipulate the tools that we need to work with, and we can do it quickly because it’s all in-house and we have full staffing.”

MGAs, like any other business, are always looking for ways to differentiate themselves and provide value-add propositions to their retail agent partners. One thing that Johnson & Johnson has been doing for some time is direct billing. This takes a major load off the retail agent because the MGA is the one collecting the money, thus saving the agents time, effort and human resource.

“In addition to that, we have a built-in capability of offering premium financing because we own our own premium financing company, Johnson and Johnson Preferred Financing (JJPF),” Barrous added. “We have full interfacing of our financing capability that links with our quoting capability and our billing capability to offer financing on everything that we offer as a quote, unless, of course, it is a non-authority situation where we don’t control the billing side or the quoting side.

“Another service we provide is policy detail downloads directly to our customer using the IVANS bridge. We are heavily involved with IVANS, which is unusual for a wholesaler. The admitted markets have been doing it for years, but as a wholesaler, we’re one of the first to offer policy detail downloads via IVANS.”

Aside from the tangible services that companies can strive towards in order to maximize their service levels, there’s one core element to being a Five-Star firm that’s much less tangible – culture. According to Barrous, it is Johnson & Johnson’s unique family-centric culture that is “the number one ingredient” to the MGA’s overall success and cohesiveness as a team.