When I first started in the insurance business as anunderwriter–which doesn't seem all too long ago in mymind–collaboration required assembling teams of people in aconference room, passing memos and documents through intraofficeand regular mail, and making phone calls. Networking meantglad-handing with colleagues and contacts at seminars and socialfunctions. Real-time processing meant dealing with the paper filesthat were piled on my desk in front of the CRT, which I avoidedusing if at all possible.

Since then, real-time collaboration and networking technologyhave transformed the way we live our lives and the way we dobusiness. People may complain about the “always connected” world,but technology feeds our need to be social and linked to peopleacross the room or around the globe. Today's collaborationsolutions also offer easy-to-use interfaces in ever more powerfulcomputing devices.

It is against this backdrop that insurers, dragging along alegacy of technology, must operate. The challenge for carriersremains how best to incorporate modern and emerging technology inways that make it easy for employees and agents to collaborate anddo business.

“Collaboration platforms are critical because you have workersspread out everywhere. You have agents and other partners you needto interact with. There needs to be a lot of information sharinggoing on,” says Karen Pauli, research director in TowerGroup'sinsurance practice. “Carriers that are willing to think in new anddifferent ways, and understand they need to compete on technology,are investing in collaboration tools and platforms and developingfront ends that are intuitive and flexible.”

Come Together

In a changing marketplace, collaboration can make the differencebetween winning and losing business. For instance, in commerciallines P&C, carriers' appetites and available programs are in aconstant state of flux.

“We use over 100 admitted carriers, and our contacts at thosecarriers are constantly changing. Carriers change appetites forcertain classes of business and develop new programs. It'simpossible for us to keep a centralized database of all thisinformation,” says Cristy Le?n, business development and riskmanagement coordinator for the Seitlininsurance agency.

Also, as a member of the worldwide agency network AssurexGlobal, Seitlin needed a way to collaborate within its own firm andwith other Assurex partners. “Whenever we were looking at doingbusiness in another state or other places around the world where aclient had offices, it was difficult to determine which of ourpartner agencies and which carrier could deal with that. It was atime-consuming and tedious process to call around to see who couldplace a piece of business,” Le?n says.

Seitlin turned to an online networking and collaboration toolfrom ProspX, which it began using in January 2009. ProspX allowsagency staff to search for and collaborate with colleagues withinthe agency, partner agents, and underwriters at different carrierswho have expertise in a particular class of business. Contactinformation comes from agents and carriers within the ProspXnetwork. Seitlin can also augment the database with proprietaryinformation that can be kept private from competing firms.

“ProspX is hands-on in having the carriers they partner withkeep information up to date. And on the agents' side, in the eventwe learn that someone has an appetite for a class of business or acontact for a carrier, we can add that information. We also have a'ProspX champion' within each agency,” Le?n says.

ProspX reports having over 100 broker customers using thenetworking platform and over 10,000 “underwriter expertiseprofiles” searchable on the network. Carriers also can pay for“premier placement” in searches, a similar concept to GoogleAdWords. Brokers pay per user/per month, and carriers pay annuallyfor access to those brokers based on the current amount of premiumsrepresented by the network.

Once agents identify an underwriter and begin the quotationprocess, ProspX tracks the communications made within the platform.E-mail communications can be captured via an Outlook plug-in.Seitlin maintains win/loss data in the system that the agency canuse to fine-tune its marketing efforts. “Over time, we're buildinga marketing file within ProspX that we can pull out and attach toour agency management system and analyze,” Le?n says.

This is helping Seitlin identify target markets more quickly,benefiting both its sales efforts and its clients. “Unfortunately,the tendency in this business is for every man to be an island, forno other reason than information gets lost in the hustle andbustle. By capturing this information, agents are connected,” saysLe?n.

“Recently, a marketer was preparing a renewal submission, andProspX popped up some carrier contacts she hadn't thought ofbefore,” Le?n illustrates. “She didn't realize they had specialprograms that had potentially better rates and terms for thatclient. That gave her the ability to get the incumbent carrier toagree to better terms and pricing. It taught her to rely on notjust who you know, but who you may be missing. Although we are notin the habit of switching business, we do want to get our clientthe best program available.”

Tracking wins and losses pays long-term dividends, as well.“When we are negotiating with carriers for the following yearregarding business targets, we can come armed to meetings withbetter information. For instance, we can show them that, while theyclaimed to be a target for a certain type of business, they wereonly responsive to a very low percentage of submissions. Likewise,they can show us where we might have been bringing them the wrongclasses or quality business. It improves collaboration andcommunication,” says Le?n.

Building a Better UI

The effectiveness of collaboration depends in part on how easythe user interface is. Seitlin had considered other sales and CRMplatforms, but chose ProspX because it was designed for theinsurance transaction.

“If agents have to answer questions to use the tool that aren'trelated to insurance or are cumbersome to answer, they won't useit, and that was a problem we found with other systems,” Le?n says.“Sales people are drivers. They need a tool that fits into the waythey already work, doesn't bog them down, and gives theminformation to get where they need to go next.”

Although it has become clich? for insurers to talk about being“easy to do business with,” the phrase does describe an essentialobjective in UI design. People are accustomed to interacting withsystems that incorporate a high-performance user interface.Carriers are challenged to provide that experience in order toattract agents–particularly independent agents–as well ascustomers.

“Firms need to keep in mind that, when it comes to the UI,they're not just competing with other insurance companies,” saysLee Kowarski, principal at kasina, consultant to the assetmanagement and insurance industries. “They're competing with users'expectations, which are being set by Google, the New York Times,ESPN. A financial advisor is not going to think, 'Oh, I'm on aninsurance site, I can accept less functionality.' Instead, theythink, 'Boy, this is clunky.'”

14 Days to 14 Minutes

“Agents need more information, easy access to multiple accounts,and the ability to do multiple tasks. They need a job supporttool,” says Paul Giurata, managing partner and lead solutionarchitect at user interface design firm Catalyst Resources.

“The back-end functionality for a lot of legacy [insurance]systems hasn't needed to evolve, but the user experience needs to,”he adds. “In some cases, it's still terminal based. Organizationsshould look at legacy applications and determine, even if theydon't want to change the functionality, whether it needs a newUI.”

In 2001, FarmersInsurance Group Web-enabled its legacy commercial linesprocessing system (CLS). Although the effort–dubbed eCLS–was asignificant upgrade over the hard-coded, green-screen CLSinterface, shortcomings of eCLS became apparent as the yearspassed. The system was designed with a product-driven, rather thanagent-focused, approach, leading to redundancies and duplicate orunnecessary data entry. Additionally, while agents used eCLS,underwriters used the legacy platform interface, making itdifficult for the two constituencies to collaborate.

Farmers had definite usability objectives in mind in a 2007revamp of the system, now called Farmers Business Insurance Express(Express). The company's overarching goal was to change the systemto be customer-driven, which included significantly simplifying theuser interface. The system's initiative coincided with a salesstrategy aimed at encouraging agents who primarily wrote simpler,personal-lines coverages to expand into more complex commerciallines policies.

Farmers went straight to the source to determine what featuresagents most wanted in a user interface. “Agent experience was thedriving force of the project,” says Paul Burger, Farmers' directorof commercial IT. “We had been collecting feedback from agents onthe previous incarnation of the Web system, and we also conductedagent surveys and agent and underwriter focus groups regarding whatthey wanted in Express.”

Listening to users is a best practice, but many insurers fallshort in “user experience awareness,” says Giurata. “Insurancecompanies don't have enough people spending time studying thoseusers. The typical approach is to have a subject-matter expert oran outside consultant [responsible for design], but they don'tspend enough time with the actual users.”

Farmers' listening efforts enabled the company to determine gapsand needs, which it then prioritized. In general, gaps fell intothree general categories: simplifying and demystifying the agentexperience; increasing the pass-through rate by incorporating moreautomated decisioning; and dramatically reducing the time todeliver documents such as bound policies and certificates ofinsurance.

“We identified that we needed to provide agents and underwritersthe same interface and eliminate some of the manual steps they hadto go through by prefilling data using Web-service calls tothird-party data sources,” Burger says. “We also wanted toautomatically underwrite some of the smaller risks to free upunderwriters to handle more complex accounts.”

Prefill is essential to a high-performance UI in insurance,according to Pauli. “Prefill provides both speed and capability inthe front end,” she says. “You have to bring that from the externalprovider through your own corporate system, which also means youneed to have enough firepower in your portal architecture to handlethat prefill integration.”

Farmers used Pegasystems' SmartBPM solution to power the Expressplatform, which it rolled out in 2007, beginning with itsrestaurant product. SmartBPM uses ACORD XML messaging services thatserve as the backbone for interfacing with both internal processingplatforms and third-party data sources. It also incorporates IBM'sInsurance Application Architecture (IAA) and includes workflowtemplates that Farmers used to simplify and automate applicationand underwriting processes. Product configuration capabilitiesenabled Farmers to take a rules-based, template approach to extendExpress to its remaining commercial lines product portfolio overthe course of a two-year rollout.

“Once we had the first product created, we could build upon thattemplate for the next products. Also, there's already a baseworkflow for quotes and applications within the Pegasystemsplatform. Underwriting rule configuration is a standard feature.We're able to do much 'out of the box' with configuration ratherthan a lot of custom coding,” says Burger.

The Express system has accomplished Farmers' goal of simplifyingthe interface–and the overall application process–for agents.“Previously, there were too many data fields that needed to beentered. Now we are able to go out to D&B [Dun &Bradstreet], NCCI, Choicepoint [now LexisNexis Risk Solutions],Polk Automotive, and other sources to prefill that data,” Burgersays.

Also, by shifting the emphasis of the Express interface fromproduct to user, and by using dynamic underwriting rules, Farmershas reduced the number of questions agents have to answer andeliminated redundancies and irrelevant questions. Agents also havegreater visibility into the application process. “In the life cycleof the quote, agents know exactly where the application is, who theunderwriter is, and how to contact the underwriter,” saysBurger.

That in turn has improved collaboration. “With eCLS, theapplication would go from the agent to the underwriter and theagent would have to wait to hear back. Now, the underwriter andagent can communicate in an online format and transfer informationmore easily back and forth. We've also implemented automated e-mailnotification so that if a quote that has gone to an underwriter forapproval has been approved, the agent can go to their queue andpick it up.”

The impact of Express has been to reduce the time it takes toissue a quote and approve an application from 14 days to 14 minutesthrough the elimination of manual processing steps. New businesshas increased, thanks in part to the addition of 1,500 personallines agents as new commercial lines producers who are takingadvantage of the easy-to-use interface and automated workflows ofExpress.

Farmers also sees a convergence between prefill and cross-sell.Recently, the company implemented a project to apply rule logic todata from existing policies and prefill applications for otherlines of coverage. “We've already seen an increase in sales byimproving the efficiency of the application process,” Burger says.Farmers intends to expand the application automation functionalityinto other areas, such as automatically offering endorsements basedon account characteristics.

Burger says the only point of frustration for agents andunderwriters is the speed of the Express platform. “Pegasystemstakes a lot of memory–users wish it was faster. But on the otherhand, we have many more agents writing commercial business todaythan ever before, and they are thrilled with the ease ofapplication and the transparency into the quote life cycle. Theykeep asking for more and more capabilities,” he explains. Plannedcapabilities include incorporating additional third-party datasources, Web 2.0 features, and social networking applications intothe Express front end.

The Rich Internet Experience

Delivering a better user experience that facilitatescollaboration continues to evolve toward pushing more functionalityto the front end itself. While a modern UI can solve manyfrustrations of agents in dealing with a legacy platform,calculations and processing are still dependent on the back end.“Doing more without having to click through to a certain page, orhaving to refresh a site to perform a calculation, is a keyfunctionality” insurers should strive for in a high-performance,rich Internet application (RIA), says Kowarski.

He illustrates the difference with a common insurance calculatorfor life insurance. “Users should be able to have the resultschange dynamically as they 'slide' their age, policy limits, orother parameters. But at many sites, you have to change the data,click 'submit,' and wait for the results to refresh,” he says.

“With rich Internet applications, the software itself is definedby the experience it creates, not by the back-end system. All theWeb apps before RIA have been rotary phones. RIAs are pushbuttonphones, and just as it makes no sense to develop a rotary phoneanymore, it makes no sense to do traditional Web development fornew apps,” Giurata claims.

“For new development, it's also more efficient, requires lessdevelopment effort, and delivers a longer application life to doRIA,” he says. “As a result, this year is the first year we've seenthat if a Microsoft shop is entertaining a new application, theywill seriously consider Silverlight. That wasn't the case asrecently as last year.”

Performance Push

“Carriers have been wrestling with internal issues to bring inrich Internet apps for a really good portal experience,” Paulisays. “Also, even if the front end takes on greater functionality,the results have to make it to the insurers' back-end systems atsome point. Some carriers are still hung up by what happens–ordoesn't happen–between the portal and the back end. They'restruggling with legacy technology that operates in batch or can'tgather information sources and push it to the portal.”

They also contend with an “extreme shortage” of businessanalysts who can translate user needs into technical requirements,says Pauli. “It's a different breed of analysts who can understandthe tools that vendors have to customize systems to get some greatfunctionality, but carriers who really 'get it' have a team ofbusiness and IT people who are focused on that goal,” she says.

Carriers do realize the need to improve the UI and allow agentsand underwriters to communicate, collaborate, and do business.“They're trying to get more and more front-end functionality outthere,” says Pauli. “But, if you're going to push that kind offunctionality, it better be a high-performance interface thatdelivers it. Users aren't willing to wait around any longer.”