Time is one commodity that is equally scarce for everyone. Nobody has found a way to create more of it, nor to affect its passage. Since it is so precious, it makes sense that we should waste as little of it as possible. We all waste time occasionally, but it is important to identify things that cause us to waste our time and change our behavior (or the behavior of others) to eliminate persistent time-wasting activity.
Sometimes our trading partners cause us to waste time. I recently encountered a third-party claims administrator who tried to speed up the processing of peer medical reviews of claims that were pending denial for lack of medical necessity. The claims staff asked their medical consultants if they could transmit the claims to them by e-mail and receive the reviews back in the same manner. Believe it or not, most of the consultants asked to continue receiving faxes, because they didn't use e-mail. This happened in January, not years ago.
Another example of time-wasting affected our agency directly. When policies issued by one of our carriers are reinstated after a pending cancellation for nonpayment of premium, the carrier sends us the reinstatement notices as single-page PDF documents. We receive as many as 10 of these items a week, attached to separate e-mails. Each e-mail has to be opened and routed to the appropriate CSR. The CSR then has to open the e-mail and attachment and make a notation in the client's electronic file. This task could be accomplished more efficiently if the reinstatement notice were sent in a form that could be directly attached to a client's file. Though the carrier eliminated paper, its workflow has not improved. In fact, processing this transaction takes more time than it did back in our "paper" days.
We requested more efficient communication from this carrier and were told we were the only agency complaining about the PDF notices. This reaction taught us the importance of informing carriers of problems immediately. It's vital that everyone affected speak up; if they don't, carriers may incorrectly assume their procedures are efficient and widely accepted.
It is encouraging to see many company partners of ACT (The Agents Council for Technology of the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America) using real-time technology that permits agents to streamline the workflow of such common transactions as billing inquiries and claims inquiries. Used repeatedly dozens of times a day by every agency in the country, these real-time transactions save agencies time and money while also giving customers faster responses.
If your agency management system vendor hasn't implemented real-time transactions, they are costing you time. All of us agents must press our vendor partners to adopt the available real-time transactions. Our vendor was slow to implement real-time capability, but did so when it became evident to them that they faced a loss of customers if they didn't change. With both vendors and carriers, keep pressing. Anything short of real-time is a waste of your time–and none of us has enough time to waste.
Edgar J. Higgins Jr., CPCU, is the owner of Progressive Management Consulting and the Thousand Islands Agency in Clayton, N.Y. Readers may contact him at ed@edhiggins.com.
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