The revenues of P&C insurance agencies plummeted during the recession, making it increasingly important that agencies operate as efficiently as possible.

"Agencies aren't any different than carriers," says Teresa Addy, business technology analyst at EMC Insurance Companies. "They need to find ways for their service staff to get more done, in less time, and with fewer people. They need to find ways to have technology help with their workload."

The recession impacted the agents' clients, increasing work for both producers and CSRs. "Given the current economy, our CSRs are getting more calls to have renewals looked at to be sure they have the most effective pricing," says Lisa Parry Becker, principal of the Parry Insurance agency.

IN THE TRENCHES

Savvy insurers realize the importance of CSRs to the insurance business.

"CSRs are making the day-to-day decisions around how business is placed—and those decisions can be based on how much they like a company's system and how easy it is to use," says Belen Tokarski, assistant vice president of small business technology and agency solutions at CNA.

And insurers are relying on CSRs to do additional work. "Like many carriers, we are asking CSRs to do more data entry in the quoting process. They don't mind if there is value added and if we make the process easier. In a way it helps them meet their responsibilities at the agency," says Joseph Feo, assistant vice president, who oversees the claims and agency integration efforts of the Selective Insurance Company of America.

There is wide variability in how well carriers achieve the oft-stated ease-of-business objective. "Even with the advances in agency management system integration, CSRs still need to deal with carrier portals, and of course everybody's system is a little different," says Ellen Carney, senior analyst at Forrester Research.

"There are no standards in portal design to make it easy for people who have to service customers to find information in the same place among different companies, and that potentially slows down response time," she adds. "We heard of one case where an agency has hired someone just to be 'portal navigator.'"

Compounding the problem for CSRs is that the sales side of technology has gotten most of the love and attention from insurers in recent years. "Customer acquisition sites are fabulous. They have chat, they're in multiple languages. Carriers are investing in mobile tools for agents. There is this pursuit of the bright and shiny objects," says Carney. "Meanwhile, CSRs would just like to focus on the fundamentals."

But it's not just carriers that cause frustrations for CSRs. "Some principals and agency owners have never taken an interest in what their technology—their machine—will do," observes Brian Bartosh, president of the Top O' Michigan Insurance Agency.

"Manufacturers understand their ma-chines and their role in making money, but agents don't," Bartosh elaborates. "Agents say, 'There's a person in the office that runs that.' Or they see computers as an expense that they need, rather than a tool for real productivity. CSRs want certain things from technology, but what they really want is support from the top around technology."

REAL TIME VS. PORTAL

Although reducing data entry and servicing customers on first contact using up-to-the-minute information are essential for CSRs, there are different approaches to achieving these objectives. For proponents of the industry's Real Time/Download campaign, winning the war on keystrokes for CSRs means enabling a round trip of data: click on a button in an agency management system or comparative rater for immediate access to information from a carrier's system.

"I have no clue why a carrier wouldn't want to provide a real-time interface," Becker says. "Maybe they don't want to write business?"

"The hub of the agency is the management system, and CSRs want to use it to work with all the carriers they represent. Particularly in personal lines, policy upload and download in real time to the agency management system are absolutely essential for CSRs. Unfortunately, that capability is not provided by all carriers," argues Jeff Yates, executive director of the Agents Council for Technology (ACT), a supporter of the Real Time/Download coalition.

"The overarching issue is that CSRs want to be able to work in a consistent way with multiple companies, but there is a real lack of consistency in the market," Yates adds. "Some carriers have implemented policy view and billing inquiry but can't do claims inquiry, which others can, so CSRs have to know the differences among their carriers and use a different workflow for each. It's frustrating for CSRs."

Becker's agency uses Applied's The Agency Manager (TAM) version 8 and plans an upgrade to version 11 in the near future. "I don't know how we could service our book of business, do our remarketing, and handle all the other work our CSRs do without real-time integration," she says.

In fact, the Parry Insurance agency requires all its carriers to support real time bridging. "Over the past few years, we did change the carriers we represent as a result of their commitment to real time, or at least having a plan in place to cut over to it," she says. "By not participating [in real time], they're not even part of the discussion."

"With comparative raters and other multi-company tools, we are truly able to act as an independent agency again," Becker adds. "Rather than being tied to a single company portal, today our agents and CSRs can go out to a much broader marketplace that is participating in real time."

"People who have used real time as a habit find it is a real life saver for them, but it has to be 'quality' real time," Bartosh says.

Quality means that carriers need to not only support transactions, but also ensure that the response is appropriate for work CSRs need to complete. "One company may get a billing inquiry and send back the amount due. That's not a quality transaction," Bartosh argues. "CSRs need detailed information in a format they can easily send to customers."

All of Top O' Michigan's leading carriers support real time bridging. "Carriers that do not support it are not partner carriers—we just don't grow books of business with them," Bartosh says. "Our CSRs know that dealing with those carriers is more work, so business gravitates toward those that provide real-time inquiries, download capabilities, and rating."

In the past year, EMC Insurance has expanded its bridging to agency management systems and comparative raters to provide roundtrip rating for personal lines and business owners, and claims download, adding to the policy, billing, and claims inquiry capabilities it already had.

"We try to make sure CSRs have access to all the information they need while staying within their management system and workflow," Addy says. "We understand that service transactions take up a huge majority of CSRs' daily processing." EMC will continue to build out real-time capabilities for rating of more complex commercial lines.

With the vast majority of its written premium in commercial lines, Selective began its real-time bridging in that book, then expanded to personal lines. "We wanted to start in commercial to have the biggest bang for agencies' buck," says Feo.

Most of Selective's newer bridges in personal lines have involved comparative raters, rather than agency management systems. "As technology continues to evolve, comparative raters have become the way for agents to quote in personal lines," Feo says. "As those rating systems gain traction in commercial lines, we are building those out as well."

PORTAL POWER

Although multi-company platforms have their proponents, carriers must contend with the fact that a wide range of technological sophistication exists among the agency force.

"We are trying to encourage agencies that aren't as willing to embrace real time technologies to pick up the pace a little bit, but we still need to support the different capabilities and expectations that are out there," Addy says.

"Carriers face a dilemma because not all their agents even have agency management systems, so they need to keep up the portals," Yates admits. "But we are encouraging more agents to move to the new improved workflow enabled by real time integration."

There are other reasons that portals can be a better solution, at least in the near-term, for extending technology capabilities to CSRs. When UK-based commercial insurance provider Arista needed a quick way to bring an online sales and service platform to the marketplace, it created a portal using edge IPK's edgeConnect rather than strike a deal with any of the UK vendors that offer comparative rating services.

"The portal works best at the present stage of development. We wanted to move quickly and to do it ourselves, which is much cheaper than trying to work with [comparative rating] software houses," says Dave Cheeseman, head of business systems, Arista.

EdgeConnect allowed Arista to custom-design a portal that would deliver a consistent and streamlined frontline experience when connecting to its back-office rating and administration systems. It also allowed Arista to deploy the portal in just over four months. Using IPK's development tools, within 18 months of deployment Arista brought seven of its commercial lines products to market, three of which were developed entirely by Arista's in-house staff. New products are brought online today in four to six weeks. The company also expanded the platform beyond sales to include mid-term endorsements and renewal processing for CSRs.

Knowing it was competing against a marketplace of multi-company raters, Arista wanted to make its portal a primary destination for CSRs and brokers through both functionality and design. "We wanted to make it easy, and make it cheap," Cheeseman says. "The system needed to be more efficient than what they had been using [from other insurers] for distribution. It needed to strip operational costs from the front end and produce a streamlined workflow."

The portal approach also provided an easier way to support agent customization of Arista's white-label products. "The retail agent's branding can flow through the whole site if required," Cheeseman explains. "At the same time, we can control the user experience through the front end and its integration to the back end. We also have the ability to provide different experiences, different pricing, and other areas of flexibility for different retail agents based on different parameters."

But as its business grows, Arista may need to support other ways of doing business for CSRs. "We now have grown a core community of brokers and, as we build that community out, we may need to go onto other core portals to support them," Cheeseman says. "In five years' time, we might have our products deployed on a number of other portals."

A portal can also supplement a carrier's other sales and service technology. In December 2010, CNA deployed a solution based on the SeaPass Insurance Portal. Originally deployed for business owners and workers' compensation and since expanded to commercial auto, the SeaPass portal provides an additional channel for CSRs to perform quote, submission, and inquiry. The system also supports requests generated through ACORD XML, whether initiated from an agency management system or other platform.

"The SeaPass solution was designed for an agent or CSR who already has good data on a client in their agency management system. It is used primarily when they are remarketing an account," Tokarski explains.

Tokarski reports that the reception by CSRs to the system has been positive. "They like the speed," she says. "Small business is low premium, so the technology supporting it has to be fast and easy to use."

Incorporating "producer templates" earlier this year also spurred interest in the system. "We gave agents the ability to define default coverage limits so that any time a CSR starts a piece of new business, that information is pre-populated," Tokarski says. "That has saved a lot of keystrokes."

Since deploying SeaPass, CNA has re-ceived over 20,000 submissions through either the portal or agency management system integration. After a recent marketing promotion on the SeaPass system, CNA doubled its number of quotes processed and saw a 250 percent increase in the number of policies issued compared to the same period of last year.

TARGETING THE PAIN POINTS

In addition to the service challenges driven by the current economy, two areas of particular frustration for CSRs are certificates of insurance and password management.

"Certificates are the bane of our existence," Becker says. "It's a time-consuming process and one where we don't make any money. I wish they would be made easier or go away."

Certificates are unlikely to ever go away, but their issuance can be made easier. Selective has focused on that objective by extending the issuing capability directly to customers.

"Through our user group feedback, we heard that CSRs were frustrated in spending a lot of time producing certificates. Although some are complex, most are routine. We realized that by allowing consumers of insurance to produce their own simple certificates, we would remove a lot of busy work from CSRs," Feo says.

On Selective's customer portal, policyholders can enter a name and address of a certificate holder and, if applicable, the name and location of the job that requires the certificate. Customers cannot enter additional wording or modify limits or coverages.

"It reduces the non-revenue work required of CSRs, but we realize agents want the complicated certificates to remain with them, as do we," says Feo.

Daily, Selective produces a report for its agents showing all transactions on their book of business, whether initiated by a CSR, underwriter, or customer. The report links to a PDF version of the actual certificate that was produced.

The system, rolled out in May of last year, has been well received. "We're seeing significant uptake," Feo says. "We are continuing to get the word out through policy stuffers and bill notes to encourage even more use."

Selective also recently deployed an application it calls PaySync on its customer portal, where commercial policyholders with auditable policies can report payroll on a regular basis rather than waiting until the end of the policy term to undergo a physical audit. Extending customer self-service capabilities illustrates a continued movement in the P&C industry that cuts costs for carriers as well as agency CSRs.

"The push to extend customer functionality through the agency Website began a few years ago and has continued to build momentum," Yates maintains. "Whether or not carriers support customer self-service, agents need to increase it on their end to take more of the load off CSRs—making it so that the customer can go in, get a quote, find out about billing, and make a payment."

Yates agrees that the other big frustration for CSRs is password management. "Even if agencies are using a management system, they have to make sure that all the different passwords of carriers are updated and synchronized between that and the carriers' systems," he says.

EMC targeted that pain point in early 2011 by rolling out a password management solution from IVANS. The real time web service ensures that, once CSRs update their credentials in EMC's portal, the data is immediately synchronized with IVANS Transformation Station.

"What happened before was that agents would update the password on our site, but forget to update it in their agency management system. Therefore, the next time they would come through their management system, the connection would be broken," says Addy.

"Today we have almost 1,500 agents taking advantage of the password synchronization service," Addy says. "As a result, agents are quoting EMC more frequently than in the past."

FOCUSING ON THE CSR

Despite increased activity around the online channel, the agency CSR remains a potent force in the sales and servicing of P&C insurance. "Let's face it, although we have this online presence we're trying to build, people want to talk to a real person," says Carney.

Meeting the technology needs of this important channel requires the willingness to listen to CSRs' needs and the commitment to follow through. Selective solicits feedback directly from CSRs through agency councils it sponsors and participation in vendor conferences. The company also has field-based technology experts who visit agencies to conduct CSR training and report back to the home office.

"We continually look for ways to help CSRs improve their workflow and improve our automated systems, and we use that in our planning for the coming years," Feo says. "We believe that making investments in CSR technology is in our mutual best interest."

CNA has created a division in its small business commercial automation team to solicit CSR feedback, a biannual product automation council, and a LinkedIn group to discuss CSR automation ideas.

"We believe it's important to get to the source of production, and that is the CSR," Tokarski says. "We've found that what CSRs want more than anything is for carriers to listen to them—then actually do something about it."

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