Improve Agency Workflows with Technology

The Agents Council for Technology (ACT) launched three major initiatives at the recent IIABA InfoXchange that assist agents directly with core management issues. ACT intends to partner with independent agents on these issues by designing tools and keeping focus on them — but only the agents themselves can carry the ball over the goal line. The good news: More and more agents realize the importance of these issues to their future.

If agents do the work to implement the tools and begin to treat this as a critical advocacy issue, we have the opportunity to make significant headway that will position our distribution system strongly over the next decade.

Agents have been clamoring for a tool that assists them in making their internal operations more efficient and in implementing a continuous improvement process in their agencies. To respond, ACT has worked during the past year with the IIABA Council for Best Practices and a noted expert in this field, Laura Nettles, to build the Best Practices Guide to Agency Business Processes and Workflows(click this link to download a free copy).

The agency first takes a self-assessment test to determine its current environment in terms of process and workflow. There are four distinct environments in most agencies, and the guide sets out the characteristics of each level. It then provides step-by-step guidance to help the agency move to the next higher level.

The guide also contains the forms and procedures used to implement the process in the agency, together with comprehensive sample workflows for both Property/Casualty and Benefits operations. Using the guide will help the agency achieve workflows that integrate fully with the agency’s technology to realize fully the benefits of this technology. It also helps the agency eliminate duplication in the roles performed by agency producers, CSRs, and processors, thus freeing up more time for value-added customer service and sales.

The ultimate efficiency of an agency’s operations, however, depends very greatly on the interface capabilities of the agent’s companies and on the ability of the agency’s system to handle these electronic transactions effectively. ACT was faced with these facts: Agents were becoming increasingly frustrated with the proliferation of proprietary company Web sites. Companies, in contrast, were telling us that the agents haven’t been delivering a clear message, leaving many company executives with the impression that agents were just fine with the Web sites.

ACT decided that first it needed to assist agents by developing a clear message that reflects their perspective on current interfaces; and second, it needed to convince agency principals and managers that they should make this issue a priority and communicate their concerns and needs to their companies and vendors at every opportunity — whether at an agency advisory committee meeting, a convention, or a one-on-one meeting.

The ACT Interface Statement, as well as Agent Talking Points, are available on the ACT Web site.

Briefly, the ACT Interface Statement states that the benefits of real-time processing and access to information through company proprietary Web sites have become overwhelmed by the sheer inefficiency of agent having to deal with a multitude of sites. These inefficiencies result from agents having to entry data separately for each company site, log on separately to each site, learn different workflow procedures for each company, and train agency staff on all of these differences.

ACT seeks to pave the way for our industry to enjoy the benefits of real-time processing while transcending the limitations on current proprietary Web sites. Companies should work toward offering agents the ability to interface in real time with them through the agency management system, so that the agent can achieve a consistent workflow while working with multiple companies. Similarly, vendors should facilitate these agent-company interfaces through their systems.

In addition to setting the objective, companies should begin to incorporate the ACORD XML standards and participate in industry standards-based initiatives to achieve real-time interfaces that work with multiple companies. The IVANS Transformation Station is the most prominent example of such a standards based, industry initiative to date, with more than 20 companies and three vendors (representing more than half of the independent agencies in the nation) working on a variety of inquiry, first notice of loss, and policy processing functions.

Where company Web sites are used, the ACT statement recommends that companies incorporate available technology so that: (1) rekeying existing data onto the site is minimized because the existing data populates the site automatically; (2) passwords are handled automatically between the agency system and the company site; (3) agents can navigate directly from their agency systems to relevant company Web site screens; and (d) Company sites are made intuitive to use from start to finish. The statement also recommends that making refinements improve current downloads.

Even though the ACT statement presents a compelling message for the need to improve, agency needs will probably fall to the bottom of the pile of proposed technology investments unless company and vendor CEOs hear from agency principals and leaders at every opportunity that moving beyond current interfaces is very important to them.

ACT also recently adopted recommended guidelines for company and vendor password formatting, which have the potential to ameliorate the current password nightmare that agents face. We urge companies and vendors to implement these guidelines so that in the future agency employees can begin to use a common password for several company and vendor systems. Adoption of these guidelines will also enhance security at the agency level because agents will no longer have to maintain lists of passwords.

Ultimately, agents would like to see company passwords handled automatically in the background by their management systems, but in the current environment, the new ACT guidelines would be a significant step forward. The approved ACT Password Guidelines are available at the ACTWweb site.

This article represents the views of the writer and should not be construed as an official statement of ACT.