Automation: Getting the most from your transaction reports

DO YOU pay attention to the transaction activity notes in your agency management system? You should. If you use your system correctly-as the core location for all transaction activity with your clients-the notes could be your best friend in the event of an E&O claim, providing proof of good agency practices. If your activity notes record errors and evidence of other unsound practices, they could be your worst enemy if a claimant's attorney requests to see them.

Your agency management system's report functions allow you to print a comprehensive transaction/activity log for the entire agency or for any one client. You can design a report to sort information by date, CSR, line of business and transaction type. When a producer prepares to visit a client for a coverage review, such a report can identify pending activity on the client's account and the service the client has received.

Our agency has run this report daily since 1983, and we continue to do so even after going paperless three years ago. If I am out of the office for several days, the report is printed to a PDF document and e-mailed to me for review. I recommend such reviews for every agency. A large agency may want to break up the report by department, line of business and CSR so that one person is not reviewing the activities of more than seven people-which we have found to be a reasonable load.

There are several good reasons to run and review reports daily:

• The reports can be used to complement new-employee training. New staff members should be trained on workflow and agency processes, in addition to their insurance technical training. At some point, they must have the opportunity to practice what they have learned, without someone literally looking over their shoulder. An agency can instruct new employees to "hold" all outgoing communications for one day before sending them. A trainer can review an agencywide report to see which client files a new employee has worked on, and can then examine those files and correct any errors before they're sent. We have found this to be a great way to allow new employees to learn from their mistakes without having the mistakes hurt the agency or our clients.
• The reports can help you catch notation errors. Agencies typically use their own abbreviations in recording daily activity. Everyone in the agency must use the same set of abbreviations so that anyone can open a file and understand what any notes mean (this clarity could also be important in defending against an E&O claim). As an example, "LL" might mean "liquor liability" to one person and "landlord" to another. We have found that a CSR occasionally will use a new abbreviation without everyone agreeing on its meaning - especially if a personal-lines CSR makes a note in a commercial-lines client's file, or vice-versa. Reviewing daily reports can assist management in identifying such occasions and ensuring that errors are corrected and files annotated consistently.
• Agencies can use the reports to improve customer service. For instance, management can use them to identify unfavorable progress in a client's claim settlement-such as an adjust-er's failure to arrive at a scheduled appointment with a client-and intervene to get the claims process back on track and save the client relationship. When a CSR is out of the office and his or her clients receive service from someone else in the agency, the CSR can review the report upon returning to get "up to speed" on the accounts efficiently and provide continuity of service.
• The reports can improve data security. Agencies using their systems to record all activities should save each report for two days. The reports could help reconstruct electronic records, should the agency suffer a system crash and the most immediate backup turn out to be unreadable.
• Management can review reports to identify imbalanced workloads, which can develop when an agency grows by acquiring new business. Many agencies assign accounts to CSRs alphabetically by account name; thus significantly more of the acquired accounts might wind up with one CSR than another. The reports should be checked once every six months, but notes added by CSRs should be excluded from the review. One CSR may accomplish the same amount of work as another, but with more or fewer notes. So measuring workload by volume of notes may lead to inaccuracies.

Review your agency management system's transaction report capability, and experiment with it to maximize its value for training, customer service and agency efficiency. After all, you've already paid for it.