Although agent adoption of technology is gaining steam, many in the insurance industry are wondering how technology adoption can be taken a step further toward technology truly being part of agents' sales behavior. How can we as an industry build upon existing automation investments and how can we influence behavioral change in the distribution channels that remain paper based?

The answer lies in providing enough value to the end user to drive the desired change. Simply having in-good-order submissions, faster commission payments and cost savings associated with paper based processing is no longer compelling enough to drive the desired widespread change in agent behavior. These once desired values are viewed today as baseline requirements in automated business processing platforms. To encourage end user adoption and influence behavior change, there must be additional values for the end user that are delivered at a price point that enables successful ROI implementations for the home office.

In order to broaden automation adoption across multiple distribution channels, first understand what motivates and drives each target audience. After evaluating the unique focus of different agent/channels, it is apparent that the main common universal truth is that agents do not place value in how business is actually processed, but rather how efficiently they can process sales. Agents are not concerned with how the business is being processed unless there is an issue in the process that impacts sales or client relationships. This means that agents will continue to use paper forms over automated electronic forms if it avoids business processing issues that negatively impact their clients.