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Join us here for our Winter Intern Update from Katie Blanchard and Gray Flanagan! Katie and Gray will be chronicling their winter with The Safegard Group by detailing what they have learned and their experience with our company in this Winter Intern Update.
These past two weeks I have gotten into more of a routine at Safegard and have taken on more small projects that have taught me how ever-changing the insurance industry is. I am learning that being flexible is essential to being successful.
Once I had completed the task of replacing all of the old Word document tables in the Executive Summaries, I began to fill in the new embedded Excel tables with this year’s premium amounts. Through doing this, I began to learn how to navigate AMS360, the main program used at Safegard to store client and policy information. I searched customers and looked through their most recently renewed policies to find premium amounts for this past year. For customers with package policies, I went into the activities tab and pulled up actual policies to see how the packages were broken down. With working for any company comes the task of becoming familiar with the technologies they use, so this was a good start for me to learn to work with Safegard’s systems.
Next I looked more closely at the workers’ compensation aspect of the Commercial Lines department. Different types of workers’ compensations are identified by codes, and although all temporary workers’ compensation used to be under the same code, they are now split into several different categories. I created an Excel spreadsheet that includes these new codes for temporary workers’ compensation and what kind of work each of them pertained to. This will allow people to quickly and easily find out which codes apply to their customers. I then looked at a specific client’s workers’ compensation expenditures for the past year, both what they expected to spend and what they did spend. I broke these amounts out by state and code in an Excel spreadsheet. This will allow the customer to easily identify where they were spending more or less than their estimates.
I met with Bill Calderaro, Executive Vice President and manager of the Sales department at Safegard. He told me about the Producers that make up the sales team here and the great potential for growth in that department. Without producers to bring in customers, we would have no business and no revenue, so it was interesting to learn about the goals for each of the members in the department and how they are evaluated. I learned that we have a wide range of experience in our sales department, and that each producer goes about keeping relations with their clients differently. It was great to hear the immense amount of growth Safegard has achieved in previous years, a bit daunting to learn the exponential growth needed in the future to keep the company thriving, and exciting to hear about the search for new producers underway to help achieve this growth.
Safegard is a big proponent of continuing education, so my next task was to look into various informational courses and seminars available for the next few months’ training sessions. With a subscription to Lynda.com, Safegard has access to countless courses on topics such as customer service, technology, and goal-setting. After exploring these options, I created a list of potential courses for training. It was eye-opening to see how many resources are out there and how often they are put out, as there were countless new options from 2017 only ten days into the new year.
For January’s training session, Mike Hermansen asked me to prepare a presentation of the PowerPoint I created in my first few days at Safegard that steps employees through how to use the Vertafore Mobile app. I revisited the presentation, and now having some experience using AMS360, I could better navigate the app. I added more detail to my PowerPoint and began preparing to present it to the rest of the company. As a math and economics major, I rarely have to make presentations throughout my undergraduate career. I am excited to have the invaluable opportunity of practicing and improving my presentation skills in front of a large group of people, as that will be an essential skill to have in the future.
About Katie Blanchard
Katie Blanchard recently joined the Safegard team as a Winter Intern, where she will be spending weeks at a time working on special projects for the company and learning the ins and outs of the Commercial, Personal, Employee Benefits, and Claims Departments.
Katie previously interned with a non-profit in Wilmington, DE named Strive and ran their finances.
A senior at University of Delaware, Katie is studying math and economics with a minor in business administration. Katie has been tutoring math and functioned as a classroom assistant at University of Delaware for three years; she also participated in a community rebuilding trip with the National Relief Network in Leesburg, FL in April 2015. Katie enjoys running and is Vice President of the Club Track and Cross Country Team at University of Delaware. This time last year, Katie was studying abroad in Granada, Spain.
Thank you for reading this week’s Winter Intern Update from Katie Blanchard!