Agents Urged To ACT On Insurer Interfaces

By Mark E. Ruquet

NU Online News Service, Sept. 26, 12:40 p.m. EST, NewOrleans--The Agents Council for Technology this weekcalled on independent agents to become more active in the battle tocreate more cost-effective agency-company interfaces, in part bylowering the technological barriers raised by proprietary insurersystems.

"It is critical for agency principals to become directly engagedin the agent-company interface issue, and to communicate a clearand consistent message to company and vendor CEOs and seniorexecutives regarding their needs and problems with currentinterfaces," declared ACT's paper, "The Need for More EffectiveAgent-Company Interfaces: A Call for Action."

"[A]gencies need to reward those companies which respond toagency needs for more efficient interfaces with a growing book ofbusiness, so that these company investments yield an appropriatereturn to the company," added the paper, approved by theIndependent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America National Boardof State Directors here this week during the Alexandria, Va.-basedassociation's annual conference.

While agents enjoy "several benefits" because carriers havemoved quickly to "Web-enable" their inquiry, rating and processingfunctions, as well as implement automated underwriting systems,"the proliferation of company Web sites?has also created some realheadaches" for producers, the paper said.

Proprietary company Web sites, according to ACT, "have left thejob half done" because they create as many problems as they dobenefits. "This growing agent frustration was expresseddramatically in the recent ACORD/AUGIE survey" of some 9,000agencies, ACT noted (see NU, May 27, page 5).

The main problem is that while some data can be found in realtime, the process of getting to that information is time-consumingand inefficient, ACT said.

The paper argues that even if information on insurer Web sitesare available in "real-time" to agents for policy questions,billing or claims, "it often is not feasible to keep a customer onthe phone because of the time spent logging in to the company Website, resulting in phone tag and the agent's inability in manycases to respond to the customer in real-time" as a result.

ACT complained that agents not only have to log-on to multipleWeb sites to shop a piece of business, but also must initiatedifferent log-in procedures and passwords, thereby forcing re-entryof data, wasting time, raising costs, and increasing the potentialfor mistakes.

Further aggravating the situation, ACT said, is the need toteach agency staff how to access each unique insurer system,creating a "training nightmare."

"We have an historic opportunity to harness new standards andtechnologies to realize both the benefits of real-time processingas well as new efficiencies for agents operating in amultiple-company environment," said ACT Chairman Ed Higgins Jr."The need today to enter data and log-ons multiple times, and todeal with significant variations in workflow company-by-companysimply is inefficient."

"The commitment to adopt the ACT vision and follow through withsteps to realize that vision is critical to achieving greaterefficiencies for the independent insurance agent distributionchannel," added ACT Executive Director Jeff Yates. "We havereceived a very clear message from the industry that the activeinvolvement of agency principals across the country in pressing forthese issues is critical to attaining our objective."

ACT recommends that companies, agents and vendors take foursteps to improve agent-company interfaces:

? Set a clear objective within each organization to participatein industry standards-based initiatives to achievemultiple-company, real-time interfaces between agency managementsystems and companies, and other agency partners.

? Place priority on implementing the ACORD XML standards andreal-time processing with business partners.

? Improve agency efficiency when using company Web sites bystreamlining log-ins and navigation, bridging as much data aspossible from agency systems, and designing sites to be moreintuitive.

? Focus on improving deficiencies with downloads of data toagents, and improve agency understanding of effective downloadimplementation.

The full text of the paper is available at www.independentagent.com.ACT is a group of agents, carriers, user groups, vendors andassociations assembled by IIABA to promote and facilitate effectivetechnology use and business processes within the independent agencysystem.