By Michael Miller, vice chairman, Brightway Insurance

When Brightway Insurance changed agency management systems in 2012, it was an opportunity to use data more wisely to improve business operations and customer service while honing and standardizing key practices that impact the bottom line.

Our system change, to Vertafore AMS360, involved 600 people across the entire company in many geographic regions.

As a franchisor, we based our decision on significant and projected company growth, coupled with the fact that the old system would not scale to meet the demands of thousands of simultaneous users. We also wanted to make certain a customer could enter any office in the country and receive the same experience.

Our experience provides valuable lessons for smaller agencies considering such a transition.

There are many reasons to switch, with better workflow and efficiency being chief among them. But whatever the reasons, you must always keep the customer in mind and ensure that the result is not a money savings that compromises customer service.

Central to the decision to change systems is an extensive and frank evaluation of key business operations. This decision can't be made in a vacuum and it’s an important opportunity to determine all areas of your business that may require modification.

You will want to understand the cascading impact of an agency management system change on the following operations. Here are some things to consider:

1. Hosted vs. unhosted IT environment: What is your current arrangement and should it change under a new agency management system? If you use your own equipment and IT person, consider the impact of this model under a new agency management system and evaluate risks/benefits to decide whether an expert vendor should manage all aspects if you make a change.

2. Data migration: How will your company handle data migration into the new system to use it most efficiently? Thousands of data fields must be mapped to the correct locations in the new system. Consider paperless or non-paperless. If you are already paperless, this will add another level of complexity to the migration to make sure all attachments end up where they should and are correctly described. If you’re still using paper, this might be a good time to go paperless as you will already be making significant changes to your existing workflows.

3. Garbage in, garbage out: It’s very important to clean up your existing data before you switch agency management systems. An appropriate analogy is planning a move from one house to another. If your current house is disorganized, with dishes stored in a cabinet in the living room, the dishes will still be in the living room when you unpack after the move. In our case, we were literally scrubbing data up to the last minute and making corrections to the old system minutes before we shut it down. This allowed us to migrate all the data correctly and required almost no clean up in the new system post migration.

4. Manage expectations: It’s human nature to take what you did in the old system and replicate it in the new one. Take advantage of the fact that the new system will have different functionality. You need to examine and possibly change every workflow to utilize all the efficiencies the new system can bring. The vendor can be an instrumental, neutral third party to show you how to best design your new system and workflows.

5. Don’t overlook training: One of the main reasons the transition went smoothly for us was because we paid attention to training employees on the new systems. Document and prepare all details of your training and quality process ahead of time. We worked across more than 100 locations in seven states. This included 10 full-time trainers (seven supplied by the new vendor), rental of additional physical space for training and rebuilding all operating manuals.

6. Get employee buy-in: Provide employees with concise explanations and a detailed timetable for the transition, including how it will help them in the workplace and their careers. Communicate with them throughout the process. We designated one person who was intimately familiar with company operations to lead the transition and serve as a point person. It’s important to have such a leader to oversee the change.

Read related: "Transcend Legacy Thinking."

After the system change, you need to learn how to use the new data. To effectively use the data, the system must preserve historical information for comparative purposes. Our old system overwrote the data, so we only had snapshots in time and no means of comparison.

The new system provides a rich data experience ripe for educating our team so we can adjust our practices. We hired a data analyst to take advantage of this new environment of comparative information. We’re implementing what we’ve learned across all our locations, but much of this knowledge can be applied to agencies with just a few offices or even one location.

What we are accomplishing with data includes:

Standardizing the process for store-by-store expense evaluation
Standardizing communication with customers and prospects
Evaluating the profitability of each type of policy
Determining profitability by customer
Understanding how to recruit, hire and compensate staff
Determining staffing needs based on operational changes from the new data. For example, not all policies generate the same number of phone calls, so focusing on certain types of business could require staffing changes.

Proper planning and implementation of an agency management system change is critical, but it’s just as essential to understand the outcome and the data, and learning how to use it to your advantage. Otherwise, you will have allocated a tremendous amount of time and resources without the ability to realize significant benefits to your business.

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6 Steps to Switching Agency Systems&mdash;and What to Do Afterward

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