When the leadership of The Hanover Insurance Group issued a challenge to its business units to make the transfer of book-of-business data as seamless a process as possible, it set forth a chain of events that may go beyond the carrier's proprietary offering to a solution the entire property/casualty industry might adopt.
"This was an opportunity we saw around the process," says Sean Sweeney, assistant vice president, agency automation, for The Hanover. "It has been an industry problem for a number of years because of how intrusive the processes are and how manually intensive it is."
The Hanover's agency automation group gave some thought to how it might be able to componentize the process and determined one of its vendors, AgencyPort, had a component, called BookSmart, the carrier deemed critical to the process. BookSmart translates the data coming into the agency management system.
It was by chance that the subject came up with the people at AgencyPort, Sweeney claims. "We were speaking with them about some other opportunities and got an update on [the vendor's] capabilities," he says. "AgencyPort has a translation component. We felt if we could get the data to AgencyPort and have it build a user interface to allow the agency to see how our products would line up with the needs of the agency's customers–that's the process we wanted."
The Hanover ran the idea by AgencyPort, which triggered more detailed discussions on how it could be done. "In certain cases, we could get the data from the agency directly, but the best workflow for the agents would be to integrate it with their management systems," Sweeney says. As The Hanover went further down the path, AMS Services was trying to deliver a similar solution, continues Sweeney, and The Hanover was able to integrate with the AMS solution, Bookroll-Transfer, an add-on to TransactNOW, the flagship system from AMS. "[AMS] had one last piece for the agent that really helped us out," relates Sweeney.
The result of this collaboration is known as PACTaccelerator, Sweeney explains. The process begins with a conversation taking place between The Hanover and an agency where both sides believe the agency's customers can receive better pricing, product enhancements, or other benefits with The Hanover. At that point, an invitation is sent to the agency's management system.
The agency management system receives the invitation, and through the interface integrated into its own system, the agency selects the policies it would like to export to the carrier. Once those are transmitted to The Hanover, the carrier has a user interface where the agent and the carrier can examine the policies, get a clear picture of what the business looks like, and determine whether changing carriers makes sense to the customer, the agent, and The Hanover.
"Previously, that would have been a random sampling of pulling declaration pages," says Sweeney. "Now, we can align what the business looks like to our systems, report back to the agent, and have a conversation about how it aligns to our product and the customer's needs."
Previously, this was a time-consuming process as the two sides would go back and forth. Today, it's a much quicker process and more fact based. Although The Hanover has no benchmarking numbers yet, Sweeney expects the numbers to show the process has been cut in half from start to finish.
Like most carriers, The Hanover always is looking for ways to make life easier for its agents to do business and for the agents to improve service to their customers. "When we got some initial feedback from [agents], we felt this process was overwhelmingly something they would be interested in," says Sweeney. "We did a lot of analysis and prep work upfront looking at management systems and what data was stored there to see whether there was enough data in there to quote that business. What we found was approximately 80 percent to 90 percent of the data needed to quote the business was in the management systems."
When looking at the benefits of this, Sweeney concludes: "It's really around maximizing how seamless the analysis and transfer process is for out agents, improving how effective that process is, and shortening the overall process for the agents. It was driven from an agent/customer-centric standpoint."
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