The title insurance industry is largely made up of employees who learned the business from the ground up, or transferred into an agency from a related industry, such as lending or real estate, arriving with some basic understanding of the business.
In either case, most of the actual training occurs on the job, whether it is learning how to research title, prepare title reports, examining title, working directly with customers in business development, running escrow or managing the closing. Practically speaking, almost all of your employees are likely involved in communicating with clients at some point or another.
This reality makes a title agency fertile ground for cross training. But once you have invested time and energy into training someone in a specific area of expertise, or hired someone for their hard-earned experience, why even consider cross training?
Here are some advantages to consider.
More Time
As more title agencies digitalize their most basic, yet time-consuming processes, your employees will be able to increase their productivity, focusing on more complex tasks. More than a few of your team probably spend quite a bit of time on the phone or in their email advising the buyer’s agent of the status of closing, for example. Alanna, however, can “free” your employees of such important but routine tasks, allowing you to focus on growth.
Letting the right hand know what the left hand is doing
Every aspect of a title insurance agency is integrated into one another. There are no silos in title. It is more like a web of interconnections that must work together seamlessly to achieve the greatest efficiency.
Cross training is the most effective means of ensuring that everyone in the company understands what it takes to take a title file, escrow or closing from beginning to end successfully.
Preparing for the tidal wave
For a title agency, there is no better reason to cross-train then to ensure you are adequately prepared for a tidal wave of closings.
Cross training allows you to prepare an employee from one department to step into another to handle some fundamental tasks to allow the more highly skilled specialist to focus on the more difficult tasks when things start to heat up.
Hanging on to your athletes
Frankly, sometimes an employee may get bored with the repetitiveness of their job or feel like they are “stuck” and not progressing in their career. Giving a valuable employee – someone who you have identified as an all-around “athlete” in the title world – an opportunity to grow and expand their knowledge and skills in other aspects of the agency will ensure that you keep that talented individual on your staff and groom them for taking on larger responsibilities as you grow your company. Naturally, Alanna can help in these instances, empowering you to “assign” basic client communications to her, while redeploying your employees to more complex, challenging tasks.
Emergency coverage
This may be the most critical of all the reasons to cross-train your staff. Your agency will never be sustainable long-term if you have employees on your staff who are irreplaceable for even a day.
You must have someone in place who can step up in case of an illness, family leave, a planned vacation, or even for someone who leaves to take another job or decides to retire. Every single position in a title agency is critical, and an agency owner must be clear on who is going to step in at a moment’s notice to ensure the work moves forward smoothly in all of these extenuating circumstances.
At Alanna, we know staffing hiccups happen and our Virtual Closing Assistant for Title Companies can help you in those moments by providing a seamless experience for your clients, even when you may be scrambling to cover tasks behind the scenes. From answering general or file specific questions, to collecting and processing buyer and seller information, we are on the job 24/7 for your clients. Call us today to learn more!