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...meetings online! And, to top it all off, we still receive snail mail — mounds ...y) to begin an effective documentation and follow-up process. Go for it.

...y always had. Although agency back-office operations still perform the same f...d be: someone who knows how everything and everyone works together. . . who understands the agency's goals and how to accomplish them . . . who grasps the technology and how to use it . . . who will encourage and motivate staff members to do new wo...

...ccess story because the cataloguers offered what the customer wanted more than...means to be a professional salesperson and how customers want to be dealt with...

...e elevators, since the power may go off. Don't be surprised if the fire alarm ...h. Mixtures of meat, vegetables, and cereal products, in sealed cans or jars. Canned condensed meat and vegetable soups Dehydrated so...

... for more than a week. Having planned ahead, one agent brought a gas-powered electricity generator to his office. The generator, however, didn't supply enough power to heat his office and run his computers at the same time. So he had to turn the computers off for a while and run the heat to warm the office. Then, wearing several layers of sweaters, he'd turn off the heat, fire up the computer, and get as much work done as he could before the office got cold again. So if ... is to have a well-maintained backup system for your data. You can contract with some vendors to have your data backed up through an online connection once a week, for a reasonable fee. You'd still do nightly backups in your office under such an arrangement. Of course, disaster might strike a few days after your most recent weekly backup. If you have access to your nightly backup tapes in such a scenario, you can send the tapes to your vendor and have the data restored quickly. A disaster that affects your data ... also damage your computers, of course, so your plan needs to include a way to replace them. Not long after 9/11, I attended a meeting at which someone from Marsh, which experienced terrible losses in the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, described how they recovered. Marsh used Applied's WinTAM system on Dell computers. They had a disaster plan that included agreements with both Applied and Dell. Applied telephoned Dell and ordered new servers from Austin, Texas, and had someone pick them up, since many ...

... to maximizing its automation investment. Implementation is a team effort that will require total commitment. Every employee will need to embrace the electronic file as the main source of customer information- and to accept the many changes transactional filing will spawn. For agency automation to pay off, management must to begin to redirect the time saved through more efficient processing into providing customers with more effective total quality service. Paper is an information source that when converted to an electronic database becomes universally accessible and more manageable. The challenge facing agency managers is ... . SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS Besides the ability to log and retrieve money-based transactions automatically, an A/ISystem needs several other attributes to provide full support for transactional filing: endorsement processing, policy history, interrupt, log creation, log retrieval, and summary screens. (Of course, they also have tremendous value for agencies not using transactional filing) . These brief descriptions should help you evaluate your A/ISystem's ability to support transactional filing. A word of caution: Like most lists, this one can be misleading. Each of the ... , so does the value of policy/coverage history. Being able to review previous versions of a policy improves the agency's ability to service customer inquiries efficiently. It also increases confidence in the system and the reliability of the database. Some systems allow for almost unlimited storage and retrieval of past policy/coverage history. Some also have the history integrated in such a way that when items such as claims and audits are processed they automatically retrieve the policy and coverage information in force at the time of the claim or audit. Note ...

...agency automation requires changing office workflow, taking advantage of techn...this information. Transactional filing offers one such response.

... , and junk e-mails. Important data comes to us online, as carriers are not only downloading data, but also sending us policies and endorsements electronically. We receive newsletters and announcements online. We can even go to meetings online! And, to top it all off, we still receive snail mail — mounds and mounds of paper. This information overload has serious implications. Failure to respond to a client or carrier request can be harmful from both an E&O and a client service perspective. Information overload can cause us ... we place a lower priority on e-mails than phone calls. After all, since we trained our clients to call us, so we can train them to e-mail us too. However, clients seem to know that they should call us for the best response. Of course, this doesn't hold true with our carriers. E-mail is increasingly becoming the standard for communicating. BECOMING MORE EFFICIENT How can we process e-mails and phone calls more efficiently? Create standards for completing insurance transactions based on the type of transaction (certificate request, process ... , additional information request, etc.) instead of the source of the request (phone, e-mail, etc.) . It shouldn't matter how a client or carrier makes a request. Our role is to be able to respond to any request; Identify high-priority transactions and complete them first; and Set guidelines for handling all requests, regardless of the source of the request. SAMPLE WORKFLOW GUIDELINES Items one and two above are easy to define. But item three is a challenge. Consider creating workflows for priority transactions (as ...

... between the ages of 25 and 35 who owned certain sports cars (Corvettes, Jags, Mercedes, etc.) . Armed with this list of prospects she proceeded with her marketing' campaign by calling them, supposedly to review their Auto insurance. Her creativity paid off - she's now happily married. Granted, this was an unusual marketing application for an A/ISystem. However, it spotlights the power of a fully loaded system, together with the challenge facing an A/IS manager in determining and acquiring useful information, ... can benefit tremendously from the proper management of an A/ISystem. Nothing can be worse for customers than waiting on the phone, wondering if their unfortunate accident is covered, while CSRs or claims staff try to locate a file to make a coverage determination. Of course, it never fails that the one file you need immediately can't be found, and the customer is told they'll have to be called back. As they stew over the unknown, they become madder and madder at you - the person they turned to for help ... used for claims service. A plan is formulated to load the information into the system (possibly by downloading from the agency's carriers) and to provide for continuous real-time updating. The loaded data is verified regularly for completeness and accuracy. Paper files are relegated to secondary storage (drop or transactional filing), as the daily electronic retrieval model becomes the primary source of information. As a result, files are never lost. CSRs or claims staff make immediate coverage determinations with the customer on the phone in real time, thus providing ...