The genesis of this blog post was an experience I had last month and remarked upon in a status update on Facebook.

My wife and I have had the same insurance broker for as long as we’ve been together: 14 years. For the first time in my adult life I felt compelled to price shop our policies. As it turns out, switching our home and auto insurance is going to save me $180 a month.

What’s disappointing is that when I gave the competing quote to the rep at our incumbent insurance broker and she just shrugged (we were on the phone, but it sounded like she shrugged) and said, “Sorry, can’t do anything.”

So, from the perspective of the insurance brokerage she works at, 100 percent of ZERO dollars is better than brokering out a deal (they’re brokers, right? They broker things, don’t they?) to keep a lifelong customer? To be honest, never mind matching, if she’d thrown me a bone and met halfway I probably wouldn’t have switched.

Part of the problem is that insurance sales are a revolving door. An old guy I used to work with who spent twenty years selling insurance used to like to joke that “Insurance is the easiest job in the world to earn a hundred grand a year, and the hardest job in the world to earn twenty-seven grand a year.”

The guy who originally signed us up, who used to do my late father-in-law’s insurance is long gone. In the years since then his successors come and go so quickly I don’t even bother to remember their names. Odds are if I do have to call in with a question the person I ask for won’t even be there anymore.

Without that possibility of a long-term relationship there’s no drive to maintain those connections: to have clients instead of customers.

If you take care of people, they’ll take care of you. Repeat and referral business paid for our house, so I understand that intimately. If you don’t take care of people, your customers are going to walk.

To my old broker, enjoy your 100 percent of ZERO dollars, I’m enjoying my savings.