Making Things Easier For Agents

When it comes to technology and ease of doing business, one insurer, National Grange, a subsidiary of Main Street America Group based in Keene, N.H., and Jacksonville, Fla., has been cited by independent agents as having done a lot to make their lives easier.

Most recently, in a survey released by Deep Customer Connection (see NU Online News, Dec. 12, 2003), the company was rated the easiest to do business with by independent agents. The company was also one of four recipients of Applied Systems Inc.'s Real Time Interface Award, in September 2003.

One agency head said the fact that Main Street America is paying that kind of attention to agents is not just coincidence, but a matter of working and listening to agents. The company is responding to producers by building a technology system that helps them do business. In the end, said Jo Ann N. Litwin, president of Litwin Castle & Christ Inc. of Orchard Park, N.Y., that system will earn the company more business.

Litwin Castle & Christ is a generalist agency, mixing personal and commercial lines business, located outside Buffalo, N.Y. It is a 12-person agency in its third generation of existence, handed down from father to son to daughter. Since 1987, she said, the agency has used Applied Systems' TAM (The Agency Manager).

“We have seen the system go from DOS screens right through to Windows,” said Ms. Litwin. “We've seen the companies go from green screens right to Web sites, but they have not learned the lesson. The lesson is if I have to re-key into your system, it is still re-keying the information. I don't care if you changed your green screen to a pretty, fluffy Web screen, it's still re-keying data. I want to be able to transact business directly from my agency management system to your system. It just cuts down on dual entry.

“We don't have time in this world for dual entry anymore,” she continued. “Insurance is not easy, and it's not fun. It's a cutthroat business out there. We need all the time we can to market our accounts and make sure our [commercial] renewals come in at decent pricing.”

Another problem with the continuing prospect of re-keying information, she noted, is errors and omissions exposure. Not re-keying, she said, “drastically” cuts down on potential E&O exposure at both the agent and company level.

Much of the current crop of technology being advanced by carriers' proprietary systems has other drawbacks, she added. For example, there is password management, which usually entails a lot of sticky notes around the office, and the procedural nightmare of terminating password access for a number of company Web sites when an employee leaves an agency.

“If I used my agency management system, I would just have to go there and lock them out,” she pointed out.

Much time is also wasted using proprietary systems, Ms. Litwin said. In a time study at the agency, it took a total of 100 minutes to make an application to get a rate for a single BOP policy from five companies. But doing that same policy through the agency management system which includes inputting the information directly from the management system and maybe picking a few unique company codes in some cases, then transmitting it took 10 minutes, she noted. Multiply that by the five companies and that is half the time of re-keying all the information.

Another frustration is when one input item is wrong and the user is stuck on the screen while the computer checks for an error, she said. Sometimes the screen freezes. To get out requires a call to a help desk for resolution and maybe starting the whole process over.

“I know how to use my agency management system, but I'm not into those other systems every day,” she said. With National Grange, she noted, the agency has been able to reduce keystrokes on BOP policies.

Four years ago, when her agency signed on with National Grange, they were “lagging behind in their automation,” but they offered some commercial lines products other carriers did not, Ms. Litwin explained. However, once IVANS Transformation Station was introduced, National Grange jumped in. She said the company made the technology which allows interface between the agency management system and the carrier's network a priority.

“Every company has its edits in the system,” she said, “but National Grange is one of the easiest to use out there.”


Reproduced from National Underwriter Edition, May 10, 2004. Copyright 2004 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.


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