Algeria AgencyIndustries
Your book is your best customer list: the renewal calendar
A signed policy gives you a guaranteed appointment a year in advance. Almost nobody uses it.
The article beside this one says you are judged on claim day. That is true, and it is a day you do not choose: it comes when it comes, and it concerns a minority of your clients each year.
This article is about the twelve months in which nothing happens. During them you hold the rarest thing in Algerian commerce: a list of people who have already trusted you, each with a date on which they will have to decide again.
That date is known a year in advance, it does not move, and it is written on a document you issued yourself. No other trade in this series has an appointment that certain, and almost no agent treats it as one.
We are talking here about the book as an asset and the calendar that works it — not about collection or the certificate, which the neighbouring article covers. And we will give no rate: the reason is in section 10, and it comes from the fact that compulsory insurance is not a choice.
The only asset you really own
You do not make the product. Cover, tariffs and exclusions come from the insurer, and a competitor a hundred metres away often sells exactly the same ones. What you own is elsewhere, and it matters more.
You own the relationship and you own the list. The name, the policy, the date, the vehicle or the premises, the history, and above all the memory of what was said. None of that exists at the insurer in the form you hold it.
It is that list which has value the day you sell the business, and it is the first thing a buyer looks at. A book of six hundred maintained lines is visibly worth more than six hundred lines nobody can tell the status of.
And yet it is almost always the least maintained thing in the agency. Policies are filed, receipts are filed, and the list that would tell you who falls due in six weeks does not exist — or exists in one person’s head.
The rest of this article asks nothing except that you turn it into an object: a list, a calendar, and four moments in the year. It costs no money; it costs a decision and two mornings.
What a line of the book contains
A useful line is eight fields and not one more. The name, the way to reach them, the policy, the class, the renewal date, the premium, the date of last contact, and one line of free note.
The renewal date is the field that makes the list alive. Without it you have a directory; with it you have a calendar, and that is the whole difference — a directory is consulted when you think of it, a calendar comes to you.
The free note is the field everybody deletes for tidiness, and it is the most valuable. "Second vehicle in his brother’s name", "had a claim refused in 2024 and remembers it", "prefers to be called after six": those sentences are the difference between a call and an awkwardness.
What must not appear is equally clear: nothing medical, nothing obtained from a third party without the person knowing, and no written judgement about anybody. A note is one day read aloud in front of its subject, and it should be written on that assumption.
The surface can be a spreadsheet. That is not an admission of poverty: six hundred lines sorted by renewal date do the work described here, and software nobody fills in does not.
Renewal is the only guaranteed appointment of the year
Most trades in this series fight to create an occasion to make contact again. You do not have that problem: every one of your clients has a date, written on a policy you signed, and on that date they have to make a decision.
That decision gets made whatever happens. It is made with you, it is made with somebody else, or it is made by doing nothing — and doing nothing is a choice that exists mostly because nobody called.
The practical consequence is that renewal is not a sales follow-up. It is a service appointment you should have made anyway, and it is presented that way or it is not presented at all.
The commonest mistake is waiting for the date. A client called on their renewal day has already heard two other offers, because your competitors know the same date you do — it is printed on their certificate.
The second mistake is calling only those you fear losing. The book is worked in full, in date order, with no sorting by fondness: sorting by fondness selects exactly the clients who would have stayed.
The calendar: four moments, not one
A single contact before renewal arrives at the wrong moment for half of people. Four spaced moments cost a few more minutes and cover the real situations: the one who decides early, the one who decides the day before, and the one who let it pass.
About six weeks out, the first contact is informational and asks for nothing: your renewal is coming, this is what your policy covers today, tell me if anything has changed for you. It sells nothing, which is what makes it effective.
About two weeks out, the second is about the decision: the amount, what has changed, what to bring. That is the moment a question arises and you have to be reachable.
Two or three days out, the third is a short practical reminder, and its brevity is its value. In the week after the date, the fourth addresses those who did nothing, and it recovers the most policies — because forgetting is a far more frequent cause of loss than leaving.
The four moments are written once, in the next column, and calculated from the renewal date. It is not software: it is a subtraction, done once per line.
What is said at each moment, and what is not
The first contact reminds the client what they bought. Most policyholders do not know what their cover includes, and reminding them six weeks out does two things: it prevents a misunderstanding on claim day, and it distinguishes you from somebody calling to collect.
The second gives the amount and explains it if it moved. A premium that rises without explanation is the leading cause of departure, and the explanation costs nothing when it arrives before the surprise.
The fourth — the one after the date — reproaches nothing. "I did not hear from you, your policy ended on the 12th, would you like me to reinstate it" is a neutral sentence. Any wording that puts the client in the wrong turns an oversight into a decision.
What is never said: no promise about a future claim settlement, no numbered comparison with a competitor you have not verified, and no assertion about what the insurer will accept. You do not adjudicate claims and you must not speak as though you do.
And one rule of form covering all four: one sentence per contact about what the client should do next. A contact that ends with no next step is a contact you will have to repeat.
The channel is chosen by the client, not by you
The channel is not an agency preference. A client of seventy and a tradesman of thirty are not reached the same way, and the only information that counts is on the line: what did this person reply through last time.
Writing has an advantage a call does not: it leaves a trace of the amount and the date, which prevents the "you never told me" conversation. A call has an advantage writing does not: it lets you learn that a client has bought a second vehicle.
The combination that works is therefore mixed, and follows a simple rule: information is given in writing, conversation happens by voice. The first and third contacts are written, the second and fourth are spoken.
Instant messaging is the default channel for a large part of this market, and ignoring it on principle amounts to not reaching people. What it demands in return is a discipline: write nothing there you would not put in a letter.
Note the channel that worked, on the line, every time. After one full cycle you will no longer be guessing, and that is intelligence nobody can sell you.
Non-renewal: what to learn from it
A client who leaves does so for a reason, and it is almost always one of four: price, a badly handled claim, a move, or nobody called them back. The first three are learned by asking; the fourth is learned by counting.
The question is asked once, without pressing, and without trying to win the policy back in the same sentence. "May I ask what weighed most?" is enough, and the answer is useful even when it is unpleasant.
The exact words go on the line, not a category. "Too expensive" teaches nothing; "his brother works for a competitor" or "he did not understand why the excess had moved" are facts you can act on.
After a year, read those notes in one sitting. It is the only exercise in this article that produces a decision: if six lines out of ten say the same thing, you have found something nobody in the agency knew how to put into words.
A departure is not final in this trade. A lost line stays in the list with its date, and one contact at the following renewal — a year later, once, without heaviness — regularly recovers clients who left over a price that has since changed.
The second policy: when to offer it, and when to stay quiet
A client with a policy at your agency often has only one, while their situation would call for two or three. That is not because they refused: it is because nobody asked at the right moment.
The right moment is not renewal. At renewal the client is deciding whether to stay, and adding an offer to that conversation makes it commercial at exactly the point where it has to be a service.
The right moments are three, and all are changes of situation: a move, a purchase, a birth or the opening of premises. They surface at the first contact of the cycle — the one that asks whether anything has changed — and that is why that contact exists.
The moment to stay quiet is equally clear: during a claim being settled. Until the file is closed, any offer is heard as a manoeuvre, including when it is entirely justified.
An offer is made once. A refusal goes on the line with its date, and is not raised again before a change of situation. That is the difference between an adviser and somebody people stop calling back.
The book’s data: what you are allowed to do with it
A client list is a file of personal data, and that is not a distant formality: it contains names, addresses, vehicles, property, sometimes family circumstances. It was entrusted to you within a frame, and that frame limits what you may do with it.
The rule covering most cases is purpose: data collected to administer a policy serves that policy and the relationship around it. Reminding somebody of a renewal is part of that; lending the list to a third party is not.
The most frequent practical consequence concerns sharing. A list circulating on personal phones is no longer controlled, and the day somebody leaves, it leaves too — the next section returns to that, and it is as much a compliance problem as an agency one.
Two free actions cover a lot: access limited to the people who need it, and deletion of lines that no longer have a reason to exist. A list that has lost nothing in fifteen years is not a patrimony, it is an exposure.
We give no legal advice here and will give none elsewhere. The above is hygiene; the exact obligations are asked of somebody whose profession that is, and that conversation is had once rather than never.
The book when a colleague leaves
The day somebody leaves the agency, you discover which of the two of you actually held the book. If the renewal dates lived in their head and the contacts in their phone, that is not a departure, it is a split.
Three things prevent it and none can be improvised. The list exists outside any personal phone; the number clients dial is the agency’s; and the free note is written down rather than remembered.
The number is the most underestimated point. A client holding an adviser’s mobile has a relationship with that adviser; a client who calls the agency has a relationship with the agency. The difference is invisible for five years, then visible in a month.
None of this is distrust of people. It is the same rule as the shop phone in another article in this series: a professional relationship has to be resumable by a colleague without the client feeling they are starting over.
The test is simple and you can run it today: take three clients at random and ask somebody else to find their renewal date and history in two minutes. If they cannot, the book does not belong to the agency.
What is counted in a book, without software
Three numbers are enough and are counted by hand once a quarter. How many lines fall due in the next three months, how many of last quarter’s renewals were taken up, and how many policies per client you carry on average.
The third is the one nobody calculates and the most instructive: it says whether your book grows through new clients or through better cover of the ones you have, and the two do not cost the same effort.
The second must be counted on your own book and never compared with a published rate, and the reason is in the market itself. In Algeria a substantial part of insurance is compulsory: motor third-party liability is not a choice, and a policy renewed in that frame measures conformity, not satisfaction.
A national retention rate would therefore mix two populations that do not mean the same thing — those who stay because they must and those who stay because they want to — and would describe neither. It is also what the neighbouring article says when it writes that the obligation created a client who does not choose but complies.
So count your two populations separately, on your own lines. The only figure that teaches you anything is the renewal rate of your **non-compulsory** policies, and it exists nowhere but in your list.
What we do, and what we refuse to do
What we do is make the list usable: we put your book into a form sorted by date, we calculate the four moments per line, we write the four template messages in the two languages your clients use, and we put all of it somewhere the agency controls.
We do not contact your clients. An insurance renewal is a conversation in which questions about a policy are answered, and we know neither the policy nor the person. A reminder issued by a third party who knows nothing does more damage than an absent one.
We give no legal opinion on the handling of your file, and we will not draft your retention policy. We will tell you the question exists and that it is put to somebody whose profession it is; that is a limit of competence, not commercial caution.
We will promise no renewal rate. The figure does not exist comparably in this market for the reason written in the previous section, and we will not manufacture a promise out of an average that mixes the compulsory with the voluntary.
Finally, most of this work happens without us, and it is the part that pays. Sorting your list by renewal date and calling those falling due in the next six weeks: one morning, no cost, and half the benefit of everything above.
Frequently asked questions
Do we need software to hold a book?
No. A spreadsheet sorted by renewal date, with eight columns, does everything this article describes for six hundred lines. Software becomes useful when several people write at once and the history has to be shared; it never becomes useful if nobody fills it in.
Why four contacts rather than one before renewal?
Because a single contact arrives at the wrong moment for half of people. The four cover the client who decides early, the one who decides the day before, and the one who simply let the date pass. The fourth — the week after renewal — recovers the most policies, because forgetting is a more frequent cause of loss than leaving.
What renewal rate should we aim for?
We give no figure and we advise scepticism about any you are quoted. A substantial part of insurance here is compulsory, and a policy renewed in that frame measures conformity rather than satisfaction. A national rate mixes the two populations and describes neither: count yours separately, and look only at the renewal of your non-compulsory policies.
When should we offer a second policy to an existing client?
Never at renewal, where the client is deciding whether to stay. The right moments are changes of situation — a move, a purchase, opening premises — and they surface at the first contact of the cycle, the one asking whether anything has changed. And never during a claim being settled: any offer there is heard as a manoeuvre.
What should we do about clients who have left?
Keep them in the list with their date, write the reason given in their own words, and contact them once at the next renewal a year later, without heaviness. A departure over price is not final in this trade, and rereading those notes annually is the only exercise in this article that produces a decision.
Does the book belong to the agency or to the adviser?
It depends entirely on three things you control: where the list lives, which number clients dial, and whether the free note is written or remembered. The test can be run today — give three names to somebody else and ask them to find the renewal date and history in two minutes.
Where we come in
The renewals falling due within six weeks are where the money sits, and nobody but you can look at them.
- We put that list into a form that sorts and filters.
- We work out the four moments when a contact means something.
- We write the standard messages in your policyholders’ languages.
We will not call your customers: a renewal is discussed with somebody who knows the file, and an outside voice loses the contract.
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