Designing effective workflows for your insurance agency

The following article is based on Ms. Godwin's presentation at the 20th annual ASCnet Technonogy, Education and Networking Conference, which was held in October in Nashville.)

Have you ever baked a cake without exactly following the directions? Maybe you substituted baking soda for baking powder, or baked for 20 minutes at 350 degrees instead of 35 minutes at 200 degrees. Your “cake” may have come out of the oven a crispy hockey puck. Or perhaps it had the appearance of a dessert, but, as you discovered upon sampling a slice, the flavor of a sardine.

Insurance is like baking a cake. One deviation from procedure could cause a noticeable problem, or worse, no immediately discernable effect at all. The seemingly harmless anomaly, if unchecked, over time could morph into a chain of missteps causing confusion and catastrophe within your agency.

To avoid such disaster, design and implement agency workflows. A workflow is an insurance agency's recipe for success, a guide instructing staff how to perform their duties and use the agency's computer system in the most efficient way.

Identify your workflow needs

The first step in creating effective workflows is identifying which workflows your agency needs. Most agencies require them in seven areas: accounting, new business, renewals, endorsements, audits, claims and cancellations.

oAccounting: Small agencies with one-person accounting departments need an accounting workflow. Let's suppose one day your agency's only accountant wins the lottery. Do you think that person is coming to work the next morning? Probably not. Consequently, your accounting workflow should include your agency's essential accounting functions, including how to enter a check, how to make a deposit and how to reconcile a statement. Accountants usually love details and could easily create workflows for their positions. Have your accountant write one before the next Powerball drawing.

oNew business and renewals: Design workflows that track renewals and new business. How do you track new business–by asking Billy Joe the producer who his prospects are? What do you do when Billy Joe is out and one of his prospects calls with questions, but you have no record of the prospect in your system? In your new-business workflows, require producers to document all prospects in your computer system, along with quotes offered and declinations received. With up-to-code new-business workflows, any agency employee should be able to verify a producer's progress with a prospect. For renewal workflows, include an activity that indicates to which markets your producers send quotes. That way, when a carrier calls and asks, “Why aren't you putting any business with us?” you can run a submissions activity report and a rejection report for that company and provide reasons.

oEndorsements: If you don't receive the endorsement you're waiting on in a timely manner, do you extend the follow-up date on a change request activity? Bad idea. Activity reports only record entered activities, not change-request follow-ups. You could spend an entire day extending follow up dates on change requests, but according to your management system, you would have accomplished nothing. In your endorsement workflow, make each follow-up on a change request an activity. In your management system, designate the first change request activity as “CHGR,” then identify successive follow-up extensions as “CHGR2,” “CHGR3,” etc. These activities document what the CSR has done, thus tracking the agency's level of service. Besides, don't you want to record how may change requests it takes to generate an endorsement? You may generate an endorsement after a year-and-a-half of requests, but do you consider that endorsement successful? By then, your customer may have gone elsewhere.

oAudits: If you have an uncollected audit, who ends up paying it? You do. To avoid paying audits out of pocket, you need a strict audit workflow. It should require your agency to send an agency-bill additional premium to the insured within 48 hours of receiving it from the insurer. Use your audit workflow to set deadlines for the return of uncollected audits as well. Audit time limits vary by company. Most standard markets require an uncollected audit to be returned within 30 days. (For E&S markets, the timeframe may be 10 days.) For me, day No. 25 is the due date when working with a standard carrier. If a client hasn't responded with a payment or a dispute by day No. 25, I send the uncollected audit back to the company. Then it becomes their responsibility to collect. When imposing time limits for the collection of agency-billed additional premium invoices, do not include a waiver. Other types of audits, which may not require such guidelines, nonetheless should have workflows as well. The timeline for the return of your agency's audits should be clearly outlined in your workflow.

oClaims: Claims workflows aren't as essential as they once were, due to the advent of direct-claim reporting. Many agencies don't even employ a licensed claims adjuster anymore. If your agency does report claims, however, document the process and create a workflow for it in the manner described in this article.

oCancellations: Don't bother writing a workflow for every type of cancellation. Instead, use general cancellation workflows to ensure consistent service. Do your CSRs notify clients of late notices? They shouldn't. Yet at many agencies, some CSRs alert their clients to cancellations and late notices, while other CSRs do not. This should not be. If one client receives notification, then all your clients should receive notification. I recommend that agencies include in their cancellation workflows a no-contact stance in regard to late notices on direct-bill policies and financed policies. If your agency notifies its customers with direct bill or financed policies of late notices, immediately send to every customer meeting this criteria a letter stating that your agency can no longer provide such follow-up. Teach them that an insurance premium is like a gas or electric bill. If the bill isn't paid, then the service is cut off.

Preparing for the new workflows

A workflow is only as accurate as the system or procedure it describes, so before you write your workflows, make sure your systems are up-to-date and customized. Create activities for each function your agency regularly performs, and label these activities with useful descriptions. Avoid using “mode” activities such as “memo,” “e-mail” or “phone call.” You want labels that describe the action you are taking, not the method you use to perform the action. Use categories like “change request” instead, and in the notes for the activity write, “per phone call received.”

Categories for carriers' rejections of risks may also need your attention. How many times do you get a declination from a company that reads, “I can't quote it. Not enough time.” Create a category titled “not enough time” to reflect this response. With customized rejection categories, you can accurately identify the reasons your applications were rejected and remedy these flaws.

Adjust your agency management system's parameters to fit your needs. For example, if the default deadlines are not appropriate for the insurance carriers you represent, change them. The system is your tool; make it work for you.

Any document that you've typed more than once should become a form letter, available in your agency management system. Upload existing form letters to your system and save future ones there as well.

Write the workflows

Writing workflows is never a single-person job. While every staff person may not work on the workflows directly, everyone should contribute ideas to the project. Management should be the first and staunchest supporter of workflow production. A supportive management team gives workflow production precedence over daily tasks. Working lunches or after-hours sessions with meals provided by management convey that support.

Once management is on board, recruit a committee to write the workflows. Only one person needs to type a workflow, but several others will need to provide information for it. Invite your accountants to sit in on every meeting involving transactions. Producer contribution is a necessity when writing the new-business workflow. An integral component of your committee will be the whiner, the person in your agency who complains about everything. Sell this person on your workflow plan and you will have gained a champion for your cause.

The other members of your agency will be involved on a less hands-on, but equally important, basis. Have all employees list the duties they perform and the steps they take to complete them. Group together employees who perform the same tasks, and instruct them to compare and consolidate three or four of their common duty lists. The revised, revamped lists will be your workflows, which you will pass off to the committee for review.

Each workflow should have two parts: an overview and a step-by-step guide. The overview is usually a chart or list that outlines the activities you want to document. Here, you will include directions for accessing the form letters necessary to complete each activity. The step-by-step section that follows the overview is a detailed instruction booklet. Pictures of the computer screen taken at various stages of the process are helpful illustrations for this section.

Where appropriate, include scripts in your workflow. List the questions that staff should ask prospects. This will enable even new employees to collect complete intake forms. “Do you have a swimming pool? Do you have a trampoline? Do you have a vicious dog?” To save time, instruct staff members to ask these and other disqualifying questions first. Also provide a specific, standard response to unacceptable risks, such as “I'm sorry, but we do not have a market for your business.” Having a script establishes a standard of information that should be obtained from every prospect and a standard of conduct expected of every employee.

Workflows should be created in an electronic format that easily can be sent to and reviewed by each person in the agency. Consider including written workflows on your agency's Intranet. Instead of describing a procedure with words, a Web-based work- flow could use graphics, audio, even movies to train employees, making instruction more convenient and less time consuming.

Implement the workflows

Once your workflow rough drafts have been submitted to the committee and revised, arrange a mandatory agencywide meeting to review the workflow packet one last time. At the meeting, everyone who contributed to each workflow should revise it for accuracy. When a universal workflow packet is agreed upon, require each attendee to sign a form acknowledging he or she has read, understands and will follow the workflows. Store the signed form in each employee's personnel file.

After the final meeting, implement the workflows. Don't wait another day, hour or second. Make workflow compliance mandatory and conduct audits regularly to monitor adherence. Devise a system that employees can use to report workflow deficiencies to management. Establish repercussions for ignoring workflow procedures. Are you willing to fire an employee for consistently disregarding workflow procedures? If you aren't, then your workflows are useless. Even an otherwise stellar employee who ignores workflows is a liability, since once your agency documents its workflows, it has more of an obligation to follow them.

So if workflows are so tricky to write and even harder to enforce, why have them? Workflows ensure that your clients receive consistent, quality service. Agencies that follow well-crafted workflows collect more accurate data and experience fewer E&O incidents than their less structured counterparts. Workflows are great training tools. They also track performance. Not only will your workflows reveal which employees aren't up to snuff, they also will spot underachieving carriers.

The costs are minimal. You could hire a consultant to help you create your workflows, or you could purchase canned ones, although they may be too generic to capture the nuances of most agencies. Regardless, the key to success is your involvement. Only you and your staff know the performance styles and procedures that keep your agency running. Take the time and energy to pin these down, and your small sacrifice will reap great rewards.

Jennifer Godwin is a Certified Insurance Counselor and a consultant with AIS Technology, LLC. She has worked in the insurance industry for 27 years as an underwriter's assistant, rater trainer and commercial-lines CSR. She can be reached at Jennifer@aistechnology.com.