Six Features Your Agency Technology System Should Provide Right Now

The answer is yes. Heres a collection of new tools that agency management system vendors should be providing now, or soon, to their agent customers:

1. Customized Workflow. Who says an agency management system must force a cookie-cutter workflow design on agents? An agents technology system should permit the firm to customize its own workflow. These workflows can provide a consistent pattern for the entire agency staff, to shorten learning curves for new staff, or to skip steps CSRs and producers dont need.

For example, the agency can create a workflowcertain steps and pop-up screensthat everyone follows for a claim. That workflow can be customized specifically for one person. Lets say an agency hires a new telemarketer who builds an effective workflow. When other new telemarketers are hired, they can copy that same workflow, significantly reducing their acclimation phase.

2. Client Filters. Gone are the days when producers had to work off a giant agency-wide database. Now, producers can set up their own security and filter of a client list so they can look only at the accounts that are pertinent to them.

From a productivity standpoint, sales and service personnel can customize their own views of active and inactive customers, as well as prospects. This makes it easier to market to those customers.

3. Get Help Now. Remember the old days when agents had to call their technology vendors and wait in a phone tree for help? Sure, they still have that option. But now agents should be able to click on "help" in their management systems and get an online manual along with real-time support with a technician in a live, chat-room environment. The support technicians, as theyre typing back and forth with agencies, should be saving all the information in a customer file for future reference.

4. Extended Communications. Todays agency management system must communicate with more than simply the insurance carrier. It should offer some access to customers. Just like todays consumers prefer to visit ATM machines for cash or to pump their own gas, agents too can offer self-service options.

For example, agents can offer customers access to policy and claim information. An agencys customers should be able to create, track, issue and e-mail their own certificates once the agency sets up security and parameters for those certificates.

Some agency owners arent happy unless their producers are out on the road, meeting with clients and prospects. But why should these road warriors not have access to the agency management system? An agencys producers should be able to take their management system on the road on portable computers, interfacing with the main system as needed, refreshing customer data as activity is completed.

Producers and CSRs should be able to fax off their desktops to their accounts in the same way they can print anything on their desktops.

These features are reflective of a more flexible, more dynamic and more usable agency management system.

5. E-Filing. In the old days, the agency management system had separate modules for document management, such as imaging and e-mail. Thats because attachments to customer files used to take up so much room in a database. Space is cheaper these days. Now an agency system should be able to provide a single, comprehensive electronic file of everything connected to that customer file: letters, spreadsheets, ISO forms, .pdf files, and even .wav files if a CSR wants to save voice mail messages.

6. Updates. Agency management system vendors used to mail agents diskettes that contained updates to the software. Updates typically contained important changes, such as virus protection, enhancements to workflow, and new features. But agents often never loaded those changes, worried that it would take too much time or that the changes contained some updates they felt they didnt want or need.

Or sometimes, they simply never got around to the update. The result over time was stale, outdated and less-effective agency management software.

Forget that. Now technology suppliers should be providing their agents free and regular (e.g., monthly) updates to software via a convenient, quick download over the Internet. Of course, as more agents move to a software-hosted environment over the Internet, enhancements to their technology can be instantaneous.

Some of these upgrades and enhancements are hugely important. For example, recent releases have provided agents with real-time communication capability with their carriers and business partners.

Sallie Knighten is operations manager with Roseville, Calif.-based ISU Francis-Pinney Insurance Services and is president of the Applied Systems Client Network (ASCnet), the user group of Applied Systems agency technology.

Reproduced from National Underwriter Property & Casualty/Risk & Benefits Management Edition, November 25, 2002. Copyright 2002 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.