Insight: A Sword Insurance Blog

A Service Bridge to Nowhere?

Posted by Mason Power - May 11th, 2010 at 08:05:58 am

In a recent Insurance & Technology piece, Anthony O’Donnell writes how carriers looking to have modern agent-facing technology don’t have to gut their architecture and rebuild at massive cost in time and money, a good topic and a solid post.

We’re seeing the same thing Anthony reports: AgencyPortal is being used to isolate the producer channel from back end disruption, while simultaneously allowing a carrier to differentiate on user experience by employing a best of breed web portal.

However, we would like to point out to our prospective clients that while a menu of services to call sounds nice, unless you’re using ACORD standards as the basis for these calls, your project will be a series one-off integrations of which you’ll eventually need to dispose and re-write as systems change.

Carriers who have gone with the best-of-breed approach are winning these days and those that use the ACORD data model (like us!) for interfacing with other systems position themselves for long term interoperability and avoid vendor lock in. Even tactical investments they make today in the front and back ends can be leveraged going forward as component systems change because of their use of the ACORD standard.

We have ten years experience and more than 5 times the number of clients that our next independent portal competitors have combined. We wouldn’t be where we are without enabling carriers to shield their producers and policyholders from an evolving back-end.

Implementing a Multi-Channel Web Strategy

Posted by Michael Albert - February 18th, 2010 at 12:02:32 pm

For those of you unable to attend (or just want to relive the magic again) here in it’s entirety is a recording of yesterday’s webinar.

“Once You Go Agile, You Never Go Back”

Posted by Mason Power - January 25th, 2010 at 05:01:32 pm

Or so says a fan on the official Agile Manifesto web site (every revolution, even those in project management, needs a good manifesto). (Find good background on the methodology and its manifesto here).

Listening today to a webinar by Camilion about product configuration being a key driver in staying current in today’s market, we picked up on a side comment made by Novarica’s Martina Conlon who was also speaking on the webinar.

Martina said Novarica has seen an increase in the adoption of the agile methodology by carriers, saying “it proves viability through successes early in the process”. AgencyPort uses the agile method and adds a hefty dose of method tailoring in order to suit the project methodology to the needs of the particular client, including the internal methodology adopted by that client or any third party integrators they might hire.

Because of the rapid deployment capabilities of the AgencyPort framework, the agile methodology suits us well. Since many client projects involve changes to policy administration and other core processing systems (i.e. big projects where production environment milestones can be years out), our clients’ master project plan usually calls for AgencyPort deliverables to front-end the plan, thereby driving business ROI early in the process. Using an iterative approach, AgencyPort and the carrier can prioritize these high value business drivers that will get you to production quickly.

While every RFP we see asks about our methodology (e.g. agile versus waterfall), the success of our project delivery is due to the ideals we hold to be all-important (perhaps we need to write the “AgencyPort delivery manifesto”?).

These ideals include honesty (you get the good, the bad and the ugly – we believe this openness instills trust among all parties to a project and this trust drives everyone to a better result); keeping teams intact; rotating the assignments of delivery staff so they are proficient in several areas; having a team with deep domain knowledge (we know ACORD, real-time rating, upload from agency management systems, what makes portals beloved by agents, integrations, comparative raters, etc.); and importantly, we provide a team of interesting and fun people (have you seen them karaoke yet??).

We won a significant new client in December and our project methodology played a big role in their decision-making. Thanks to Martina for confirming what we have seen: an uptick in client demand for our chosen delivery methodology. Have we mentioned that all of our clients will act as a reference??

The Agent Insight Tour: A 2010 Update

Posted by Mason Power - January 22nd, 2010 at 08:01:26 am

Our friends at Insurance Networking News wrote a feature story about our 2009 Agent Insight Tour in their January issue. It’s in print but you can see it online here, although I warn you that the interface is a bit clunky.

The article covers the salient points that agents made loud and clear and in 2010 the situation is much the same as it was in 2009: a mix of pain and progress.

The pain of serving your client with as many quotes as you can while still making a profit on the transaction – not much has changed in 2010. Yesterday we we showed a new colleague from the U.K. how an agent performs an upload, you should have seen her jaw drop.

But as we noted in our Agent Insight Tour report, there is incremental progress being made on many fronts. For instance, we are completing more real-time integrations for carriers (nobody has done more carrier integrations with comparative raters than AgencyPort), we are working with carriers whose agents send them ACORD applications by e-mail to convert these forms into XML, we are helping carriers use our consumer portal to serve consumers who want 24×7 quoting or self-service, all of these are product ideas that came from the 2009 Agent Insight Tour and are becoming a reality in 2010.

We have a few forthcoming announcements about extending the use case for AgencyPortal, we’re breaking new ground. Watch this space.

P&C Carriers and IT Spending in 2010

Posted by Mason Power - December 3rd, 2009 at 10:12:42 am

According to start-up advisory firm SMA, 76% of P&C companies surveyed forecast IT spending to be flat or increasing in 2010 (even split between flat and “mild increase”).

96 carriers participated in the survey which also found that IT spending will be flat on core processing but spending will increase for front office solutions. First among these is IT enabling of marketing & product development. Second is distribution and delivery.

Regarding distribution and delivery (which is our core focus here at Sword AgencyPort), 30% of carriers surveyed plan to increase IT spending on distribution in 2010. The main driver cited by SMA is the need to react to demographic shift in consumers who will demand a change in carrier behavior – they want self-service 24×7.

This is why AgencyPort is leveraging AgencyPortal to build a consumer portal application for carriers in support of their agent sales channel. SMA said less than 20% of carriers currently have consumer portals and this includes the direct writers, which means carriers selling via independent agents have only just begun offering consumer self-service. Contact us if you’re interested in evaluating our products for your own consumer portal.

HTML5 Will Make The Web Better. Even for Insurance.

Posted by Michael Albert - December 2nd, 2009 at 03:12:10 pm

HTML is the computer language in which web pages are written. From an insurance company’s marketing site, to it’s intranet, to it’s agent portal, HTML is the language that your web browser understands and subsequently turns into the magic on your screen.

The version of this language that your browser uses today (version 4) is nearly a teenager. While twelve years might not seem like much in the sometimes slow-moving world of insurance, technology is comparatively measured in dog years. When it was first invented, the web was a VERY different place. Maybe you remember it. There were dancing hamsters (and a dancing baby too). Google was just a gleam in Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s eyes. When not at work or school, most of us got online through a noisy modem that connected us to AOL or Prodigy. Web pages pretty much displayed static information, and only the most sophisticated ones in the bunch even used basic web forms to interact with users.

If you’ve been around for the ride, think about how much your own company website has changed since 1997 (if there even was one back then). Now think hard about everything you’re doing on the web today. Agent portals. Customer self service. Mobile versions of your website for iPhone, Blackberry and Android phones. Heck, these days lots of insurance companies wrap chat, Facebook fan pages and Twitter campaigns right into their online marketing material.

We’ve all gotten some pretty good mileage out of HTML4. We’ve gotten our money’s worth for sure. But as web experience gets richer and websites become more capable, user expectations grow in parallel. Online video. Rich data entry. Real time collaboration. Interactivity. Making it all happen has stretched the limits of HTML4. Gaps and shortcomings in the language have been filled with proprietary vendor plugins like Adobe’s Flash to enable online video and dynamic drawing (interactive charts and graphs being the quintessential example). But vendor lock-in is just not what the web’s all about, is it? The web is supposed to be an open, interoperable place, based on industry standards, not a place where one vendor holds all the chips. Well, HTML5 is coming to save the day, and needless to say, I’m pumped.

Lifehacker posted a great synopsis yesterday of some of the goodness of HTML 5. Check it out when you get a chance. In the coming months, we’ll no doubt start exploring how the capabilities of HTML5 will enhance all of our products so that they can serve you, your customers, and your distribution force on the web better than ever before. It’s not an understatement that HTML5 is going to bring some extremely compelling features to each and every product that we at Sword have to offer our customers on the Web.

I for one am psyched to get started.

User Conference Lessons Learned – Consumer Portal

Posted by Mason Power - October 7th, 2009 at 07:10:15 am

AgencyPort leads the way with effective transaction portals for property & casualty insurance.

We start with product definitions and layer in business rules and portal behaviors that are tied to the product definition, all of which is easy to build and maintain. The ToolKit enables quick add / edit / remove of portal pages and every element therein. Every transaction can be integrated with back-office systems such as security, rating or policy administration, content management, e-mail, CRM, etc.

The next solution we are building leverages this mature architecture to deliver portals for carriers to interface with consumers. Today’s consumer grew up in the digital age – are you ready to serve them online 24×7?

With direct writers eating away at market share (see slide below), with the insurance buyer being more and more tech-savvy and used to working online and through their iPhones without human intermediaries, carriers have to invest in consumer portals to keep marketshare.

Attendees at this session at AgencyPort User Conference 2009 all related that it’s not a matter of “if”, but “when” they had to offer consumer quoting and self-service.

Some carriers like The Hartford or Liberty Mutual want to close the consumer lead through their in-house sales force and then hand off the client to a local agent for servicing.

Another facet of AgencyPort’s strategy is to enable carrier interaction with consumers not just on the web but through mobile phones such as the First Notice of Loss application on iPhones:

From customer research this summer we identified a set of features desired by most carriers. See the table below for a list and while you consider your needs (have we missed any? Let us know), keep in mind that you need to have the consumer self-register on your site. The question is when? If they are going to check billing or submit a claim, you need to know who they are. If they are going to get a Quick Quote, you don’t.

During the User Conference session there were concerns about offering Quick Quotes to all visitors. Some attendees worried about competitors checking your rates; others worried about the cost of pre-filling data when that data comes from ChoicePoint who charges for every data call.

Attendees at this session also spoke about the chance to use consumer portals to support proactive customer service. If you know who’s late on their bills and you send them e-mail reminders do you have a URL or just phone support? Consumer portals can be used for secure and configurable landing pages for support or for marketing (e.g. up-selling auto policyholders into homeowners).

We can launch quote screens right from your home page (imagine your logo instead of the fictional Best Choice carrier logo):

Or if you have an agency that is looking for quoting capabilities but doesn’t have the resources to provide it:

Use AgencyPort to configure your portal to adapt to the look and feel of your agencies’ sites and launch your quote engine from there. It can be attributed to you or not, that’s a business call to make.

Either way, the workflow your agents are used to doesn’t have to change. You can integrate leads generated or sales closed on your site to their CRMs, agency management or lead management systems, and into your agent portal Work in Progress such as the example below:

The important element is the bridging of the lead to the agent. For auto insurance the carrier may be best off closing the sale themselves but for other products with more complex questions and rating scenarios, carriers are best-served when they quote the consumer and then hand it off to an agent to close it.

Several attendees expressed concern about the accuracy of carrier-generated quotes when not enough questions had been asked. If a consumer lead is handled by an agent and the consumer then discloses a history of losses or other exposure data, the agent would have to tell the consumer that they are going to get a higher premium quote. Agents have told carriers they don’t want to be the bearer of bad news.

Clearly the balance of getting the quote quickly and making it accurate will play out differently by product and by carrier, or perhaps even within one product / one carrier, it will be different by agent. AgencyPort can handle this wide variety of requirements – we’ve done it in AgencyPortal implementations for 7 years.

Many carriers have already put in agreements with agencies to handle consumer quoting and self-service on carrier sites. In play are the service level agreements (e.g. will agents respond promptly) and commission (e.g. if the carrier sources and closes the sale it will hand the policy holder to an agent for servicing but at a reduced commission).

A hurdle identified by a customer in the audience:

One attendee said that he felt web traffic wasn’t high enough to generate a return on the investment. Others felt the business case is based more on “survival” than on revenue growth. We talked a lot during the session about search engine optomization as web traffic comes mostly from Google, etc. and how the “search engine ninjas” were the lead generators or aggregators like InsureMe and NetQuote, who invest massively in being atop the native and paid results in Google and claim in excess of 80% market share between them.

Lead generators sell each lead up to 8 times over and mostly to agencies. Carriers who have dabbled in buying leads have found mixed results at best. Our research and analysis says that technology has not been there to support this and at AgencyPort we will offer solutions that integrate leads through carrier workflow to get a quote and bridge it over to the agent as before.

Wrapping up a lengthy post is the “aha moment” most often experienced by attendees at our User Conference including at this session on AgencyPort’s Consumer Portal: that your existing investment in defining products, transactions, rules, behaviors, data choices, data validation rules, etc. with AgencyPort is all reusable in consumer interaction. As one carrier in the audience said “the product’s the same, it’s just a slightly different user experience that needs to be defined.” Once defined in any AgencyPort solution, your definitions are usable in all AgencyPort solutions.