ACCENT Marketing Services still has a rosy glow to it a week after Valentine’s Day as the customer engagement solutions provider recently acquired the Licensed Agent line of business from a insurance solutions provider.
Thanks to the agreement, ACCENT will lease space in an existing call center facility located in Harlan, Iowa, expanding its footprint to 11 locations across North America, the Caribbean and the Philippines. The new call center will accommodate up to 70 seats and serve as a dedicated insurance customer engagement center to serve the needs of existing and future clients.
The customer engagement company will also retain the insurance provider’s employees and management and assume its client contracts related to the Licensed Agent line of business.
“Due to evolving regulation, we’ve seen a growing demand for licensed agents that can go beyond the traditional two-tier model of verifying the purchase of health and insurance products to perform the field agent role of selling policies, additional coverage and add-on protection across all stages of the customer lifecycle,” said Tim Searcy, ACCENT’s CEO. “With the addition of this new line of business, we can now leverage the specialized skills of licensed agents to expand our customer engagement capabilities within the insurance and financial services industries.”
With this latest acquisition, ACCENT becomes responsible for more than 25 individuals that are licensed to provide inbound and outbound sales and customer support in both Life, Health, Property and Casualty insurance across all 50 states. For the past five years, ACCENT has sold and supported a variety of insurance programs from term life sales to tele-interview underwriter support to customer retention.
As the Harlan call center gets ready to be taken over, ACCENT has appointed industry veteran Gene Gettys to lead the Harlan team. Gettys brings to the table more than 20 years of operations management and leadership experience to ACCENT and has spent the last 13 years managing licensed and non-licensed call center operations on behalf of a insurance solutions provider where he was responsible for site operations, including production, learning and development, operations support and licensing.
“ACCENT is a forward-thinking and fast-growing company with a near obsession for delivering outstanding customer and employee engagement,” said Gettys. “I couldn’t be more excited to join such an outstanding organization, which is well-known throughout the industry as a symbol of excellence and success.”
Edited by Jamie Epstein