Agents Combat Failure To Communicate

The Agents Council for Technology has issued a report offering guidelines and recommendations to standardize electronic communication between insurance companies and agents.

The ACT report, titled "Independent Agency Preferences for Carrier Electronic Communications," contains recommendations that would improve communication and productivity, as well as aid agencies in becoming paperless.

"Today, the carriers are all over the lot with regard to the methods they use to communicate electronically with their agencies," said Mele Fuller, who chairs ACT's electronic communications working group.

"This is very inefficient for agencies and makes it difficult for them to manage these communications effectively," added Ms. Fuller, the director of vendor integration at Seattle-based Safeco.

ACT Executive Director Jeff Yates said the group encourages "carriers to adopt ACT's recommendations in order to give agencies a consistent approach to these communications, along with the administrator tools to make sure these messages are routed to the appropriate people in the agency."

The 12-page report contains an extensive chart recommending how certain communications should be sent, an incremental solution, and what the subject line should say to inform agency representatives. (The report--with the full recommendation chart--is available online at www.independentagent.com/act.)

An ultimate aim of electronic communication, according to the report, is the elimination of paper correspondence and utilization of the agency management system.

Certain subjects should be sent as alerts that the agency management system will capture within the customer's electronic file, and which will be forwarded to a customer service representative's activity log.

"As much as possible, agencies want to handle carrier communications within their agency management systems and existing agency workflows," the report advised.

It noted that agencies "want to process incoming electronic information with as little human touch as possible, in order to reduce the overall processing time in the agency."

However, the report said, all agencies are not technologically proficient enough to perform this action and remain in a transitional phase.

The report recommends that carriers provide an opt-in/opt-out feature for alerts by type of communication, so the agency can match its technological capabilities.

Regarding e-mail messages, among some of the report's recommendations are that when carriers send communications to agents, there should be links in the communication to enable the agent to go directly to the information. When accessing the information, the agent should not have to input an I.D. and password, unless sensitive information is being accessed.

ACT--a part of the Alexandria, Va.-based Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America--is an association of agents, brokers, user groups, carriers, vendors and industry associations "dedicated to encouraging and facilitating the most effective use of technology and workflow within the independent agency system."

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