Daly Merritt Winning Tech Race With 'Crawl, Walk, Run' Approach To Growth

Insurance agency technology leaders are rarely wunderkinds, transforming their operations overnight, as the best and brightest are usually those who make a long-term commitment of money and brainpower, and constantly upgrade their capabilities to keep ahead of the competition.

The Daly Merritt Insurance Agency is one such committed outfit, earning an Honorable Mention in the “2009 NU Agency Technology Achievement Award” program, run in partnership with the ACORD LOMA Insurance Systems Forum, taking place in Orlando this week.

The agency's unwavering commitment over the years has meant substantial investments in the latest technology, as well as developing a culture that involves everyone from the “bottom up” in planning and due diligence.

Their mission is to incorporate tech to achieve greater efficiency while providing an exemplary customer service experience.

“Our overall goal is to enhance our technology so that we have a more efficient office workflow, resulting in more time being devoted to our clients,” the Wyandotte, Mich.-based agency said in its award essay.

In technology terms, Daly Merritt's commitment includes keeping up with the latest systems and enhancements. The firm is armed with AMS360 (agency management), CBD Doc (document management), Benefit Point (benefits management) and Zywave (a software system allowing clients to set up Web pages for participants to review their benefits).

The agency–which produced $57 million in premiums last year, comprised of $29.7 million in commercial lines, $3.3 million in personal lines, and $24 million in life and health business–employs the AGENA SQL server for its technology needs, and protects its data and systems with Kaspersky Anti-Virus–which updates definitions every 30 minutes.

“Our enhanced hardware and software have given us an advantage over other agencies because we have been able to incorporate electronic files for all of our client information and policies stored on our AMS and CBD Doc servers, which can be accessed by any employee within our agency,” the essay noted. “We do not spend precious time searching through paper files to obtain information to process our clients' requests.”

The agency said it “takes into consideration the return on investment on each system we investigate and install. Provided the proposed system allows our employees to work more efficiently, automate everyday processes and devote more time to our clients, we embrace the technology changes with open arms. This, in turn, provides us the competitive edge needed in our marketplace.”

The desire to make a major commitment to technology was instilled in the four brothers and principals of Daly Merritt by their father, the late Thomas J. Daly.

Martin F. Daly, vice president for commercial insurance, explained that when his father made a commitment to growing the agency decades ago, it was his decision at that time to facilitate that growth with the best technology available.

The sons–Martin Daly, Joseph S. Daly (president and general counsel), James P. Daly (vice chairman) and John L. Daly (vice president, life and benefits)–have followed their father's lead.

“[He] was leading technology way back then,” said Martin Daly, relating how their father and his partner, Wally Merritt, wanted to put Wang monitors on every customer service representative's desk back in the 1970s, despite the expense of what at the time was considered a luxury purchase.

“It's a natural progression. We have just continued to always want to be the best in this area–and frankly, to be the best in any area we can in this industry,” he explained.

Daly Merritt's commitment to keeping technology current goes beyond just the financial investment. A decade ago the firm decided to add brainpower–hiring an agency information technology director, Melissa Armatis, with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Michigan-Dearborn.

Every commitment to technology has its challenges over the years. Chief among them, according to Martin Daly, is how to inform clients about the investment the firm has made on their behalf and the resulting tech tools available to them.

Employees are an integral part of tech changes internally and clearly see the difference, he noted, but making clients understand how tech can distinguish one agency from another is a bigger challenge that's a critical part of Daly Merritt's sales process.

The agency focuses its tech capability marketing on large-revenue clients who have grown in technology sophistication themselves as their businesses have expanded, Joseph Daly explained. These customers are more cognizant of the investments the agency made and appreciate how the upgrades benefit them, he added.

Technology also helps the agency achieve its biggest goal–to grow the business, said Joseph Daly. Indeed, the agency's tech infrastructure has helped attract new blood to the firm, as with the efficiencies achieved, newly acquired business can be more easily assimilated, he explained, thus facilitating growth.

When learning new tech applications, Ms. Armatis said Daly Merritt has developed a team approach to educate employees, forming internal user groups–or “power users,” as she calls them–that make certain workers experts in an application, and who serve as a resource for others.

“We adopt the 'train the trainer' technique,” the agency said in its essay. “We have converted our largest conference room into a training room to hold monthly user group meetings that ensure our employees are up-to-date on the latest versions of all our software programs.”

These meetings serve as an open forum to evaluate and consider current and future tech applications, while also functioning as due diligence to evaluate systems and help decide if they are a good fit for the agency, noted Ms. Armatis.

“Employees provide ideas,” said Joseph Daly. “It is a bottom-up approach to know how we can make their job easier.”

Of course, tech upgrades take not just brains but cash. After reviewing what the most successful agencies spend on tech, the management at Daly Merritt decided it was not investing enough to be where it wanted to be, according to Joseph Daly.

Thus, the firm devised a plan more than five years ago to devote 4 percent of its annual revenue to technology–2 percent for day-to-day expenses, and another 2 percent for capital investments.

Another commitment Daly Merritt has made is to become paperless. Investing in the CBD Document Management System earlier this year, the agency is moving away from paper, in-putting recent documents while gradually capturing old documents and shredding them after they are copied.

Helping to achieve this goal is the commitment to interacting with their carriers via “real time” technology, which eventually “eliminates binders of paper,” said Martin Daly. He credited Philadelphia Insurance Companies with a significant partnership in this area, including allowing client access to data on a 24-hour basis.

“They are an example of what many others are not doing,” he observed. “It is a slow-moving process at the carrier level.”

Even though the agency is far removed from what one would think of as a catastrophe-prone area, Daly Merritt has invested in a disaster recovery system.

Utilizing SMART Mail Defense and Web Defense, and SMART backup and disaster recovery, critical data is backed-up every 15 minutes to an off-site system, dispelling concern with losing a day's work if there is a fire or failure of the electric power grid before the end of the day.

“Our exposure is not extreme, but we still felt after our research of the system that the security far outweighed the cost,” said Joseph Daly.

The system also offers virtual access, allowing employees to work from home if a disaster or some other emergency keeps them away from the office, Ms. Armatis pointed out.

Reflecting on the agency's culture, Joseph Daly said that “our goal is to always overserve the client, because otherwise we cannot differentiate ourselves from all the other agencies in Michigan.”

On the technology side, with respect to implementation, he continued, “we have adopted the crawl, walk and run approach–meaning for us, we had to learn it first, we had to walk through it, and now we're on the run.”