Agency Finds Answers In Wireless
Technology adds speed and efficiency to business processes
Independent agencies looking to increase their efficiency can find an ally in wireless technology, according to one chief executive whose agency has enthusiastically embraced it.
Debra Zambrana, chief administrative officer for Gateway Insurance Agency, said her agency has abandoned old-fashioned notebooks and pens for the advantages wireless technology has to offer.
"We're a pretty innovative agency," said Ms. Zambrana. "As soon as we found out we could get wireless, the next thing you know, we all had wireless. We knew, as soon as we heard about it, we could find a way to make it work for us. And that's what we did."
The agency has three locations in FloridaFt. Lauderdale (where it is based), Bartow, and Lake Worthand 107 employees, many of whom are utilizing the new technology.
Blackberry, a wireless, e-mail messaging system, is standard equipment for employees to send and answer e-mails when they are out of the office. Managers and producers carry laptops capable of sending updated data from the road, via e-mail, to the office.
"People can respond from wherever they are at," Ms. Zambrana explained. "Our producers can now go out to a client and can connect via wireless technology to our agency management system and update the files immediately following a meeting."
One producer has even gone so far as to mount his laptop in his car.
Another advantage to wireless is that with three different locations, the agency's managers can move from office to office and not have to worry about finding an empty desk with a computer.
"We have wireless points installed in our offices," Ms. Zambrana explained. "I recently went to our Lakeland office, and I took my laptop so I could work anywhere in the office. I'm not a regular employee there. I just bring my laptop, sit down anywhere, log into the server, and work."
"It's fantastic, the convenience," she said. "I don't have to kick someone out from their desk, or hope that someone is out sick when I go to our other offices."
The agency uses Verizon wireless cards for its laptops and the Blackberry devices are enabled with the same Verizon wireless system. The current wireless system is not quite as fast as they would like, she noted, but in the beginning of the first quarter of next year, the agency expects to upgrade to wireless broadband.
Installation was not difficult. Having state of the art technology people and a staff eager to upgrade to the latest technology made it even smoother, Ms. Zambrana said.
"We have people who want to do things the easy way," she noted, speaking of the agency's producers. "They don't want to have to write things on a piece of paper and then hand it to somebody. They want to be able to put it into an e-mail immediately following a meeting and get it to their account manager. It saves them from having to come back into the office. They get to do what they do bestsell."
However, she admitted, the initial investment in wireless may not be cheap. For Gateway, purchasing the hardware and paying the monthly maintenance fees may cost as much as $2,000 per agent annually, she estimated. The annual maintenance cost for the wireless card alone runs about $950 per agent.
Ms. Zambrana added, however, that "the payback is tenfold, in our opinion, in efficiency and functionality.
Reproduced from National Underwriter Edition, September 9, 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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