Agent Insight Tour Webinar
Posted by Michael Albert - November 10th, 2009 at 02:11:00 pmThank you to everyone who was able to join us for our review of the Agent Insight Tour findings this afternoon. If you don’t already have it, you can find a PDF copy of the Agent Insight Tour report here. For your enjoyment, here are the slides we reviewed during today’s presentation:
Do Agents Like Your Portal or Upload Capabilities?
Posted by Mason Power - October 29th, 2009 at 01:10:57 pmHere are some excerpts from the comprehensive report we published after interviewing 66 different independent agencies during our Agent Insight Tour:
“There is a fine line a carrier needs to draw between asking unique or proprietary questions and giving an agent an easy and fast user experience. Carriers need to understand and rationalize the impact proprietary questions have on agency speed and ease of doing business.”
“Agency vendor systems and their export services (TransactNow and Transformation Station) are very much part of the problem. Sit down with virtually any CSR and ask him/her to show you the realtime quoting experience from their management system. You’ll wonder if the web was ever created. And, oh yeah, it’s a toll road. You have to pay for every transaction.”
“Rather than make agents remember to put data like ‘the years licensed in that state’ in the remarks field, why don’t carriers just ask the question outright?”
“Few carriers are offering commercial lines upload. Those that do, stand out.”
Read the report for more (there’s at least one on each of the 20 pages).
What Agents Really Really Want: Read the 20-Page Agent Insight Tour Report
Posted by Mason Power - October 27th, 2009 at 08:10:13 am
Readers of this blog know that we recently covered 1,500 miles along the East Coast of the U.S. interviewing independent insurance agencies. The goal of our journey was to gather current information from agents about which technologies are succeeding (and which are not) in moving the industry from paper to online.
While we posted daily updates from the month-long tour on our blog, we heard from many of you that you’d like a more cohesive analysis of the collective findings so we wrote a big fat report which we published today. Our friends at Insurance News Networking wrote a feature story about our report and you can download the report free of charge.
The 20-page report tells you what agents think about agent/carrier connectivity for commercial, personal and specialty lines of P&C insurance. While we spoke with many agency Principals, the best insight came from the CSRs and other employees who actually find themselves keying application information into their management systems, into comparative rating systems, and/or into carriers’ agent portals.
Trust us, these folks are frustrated. Here’s a quote from one frustrated CSR:
“There is as much inefficiency in this industry as there was 15 years ago. Standards are there for forms and data but not websites.”
On every page of the report you will find direct quotes from agents which evidence a problem they face every day (=reasons they deselect certain carriers) and suggestions for carriers to improve. Reading the report makes you think agents are mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore:
When an agent portal is hard to navigate or slow, it makes agents mad as hell and they don’t use them anymore. What makes them mad? Read the report, it even has a section dedicated to best practices in agent portals including do’s and don’ts that carriers need to heed.
AgencyPort staff aren’t quite so frustrated – after all we earn a living by helping our clients navigate the chaos of today’s insurance technology. But if the industry ran more smoothly, we’d find a way to make a living in that new and better paradigm, and we badly want to see a world where agents:
- can quickly check client eligibility before spending time inputting data on new business the carrier won’t even write
- don’t have to memorize terminology and web site behavior for each carrier when looking for multiple quotes for the same client
- don’t give up on policy upload and just send the form by e-mail.
In addition to insights from agents, the report includes suggestions by AgencyPort staff (who have years of agency connectivity experience and the scars to prove it) on how to improve the industry.
If you want to get alongside AgencyPort and support large-scale change in the way insurance is transacted, contact us. Or if you are a carrier and want us to make your life easier (=quote more new business and lower your unit cost of transaction) by making agents happy with your portal or upload, give us a ring. All 53 of our customers act as references.
Repeating the link, here’s where you can download the AgencyPort report.
For the press release click here.
Insights from Carriers & Agents
Posted by Mason Power - September 24th, 2009 at 08:09:45 am
We have a busy and exciting week ahead at AgencyPort.
On Sunday nearly 100 of our customers and a few partners are joining us in Chatham, Massachusetts for the annual AgencyPort User Conference. It’s a chance for AgencyPort to show our latest innovations to our customers and for our customers to learn from each other. There are very few opportunities for CIOs and others involved in using IT to automate insurance new business to get together and learn from each other about project pitfalls, how they overcame them, as well benefits and ROI on such projects. Gathering at an offsite like this always affords attendees the chance to delve deeply into what matters most to them.
The twenty sessions at this year’s conference are highly interactive and we will be discussing the latest in using AgencyPort products to connect to comparative raters, roll entire books of business without rekeying, leveraging product definitions from agent portals to allow for consumer self-service and quoting via an agent, the role of eForms and parasable .pdfs, and many other ways to create a better experience for independent agents transacting with carriers.
Among the highlights of the conference will be the unveiling of the findings of our Agent Insight Tour. We have prepared a 15-page report summarizing the findings from interviews with 66 insurance agencies in which we detail the state of play for the use of IT in supporting agent to carrier interaction and in which we draw conclusions about what would improve this interaction. We will present these findings to our User Conference audience and then publish it to our contacts and on our website thereafter.
We’re looking forward to relating what we learned from agents in the spring and to gaining more insights from carriers attending our user conference. Perhaps the best insight might come from discussions at the Monday night clambake? Watch this space.
Insurance and Technology Covers the AIT
Posted by Michael Albert - June 4th, 2009 at 04:06:27 pmAn interview with insurance and technology about the Agent Insight Tour that I gave down at the ACORD conference for ACORD TV.
Gary Brach on ACORD TV
Posted by Michael Albert - June 4th, 2009 at 04:06:09 pmGary talks about the Agent Insight Tour on ACORD TV. Check it out!
Bonus Video – The Agent Insight Tour Awards
Posted by Jeff Boedeker - May 21st, 2009 at 03:05:02 pmA behind the scenes bonus – Awards are handed out to tour participants. Enjoy!
Day 20-23 Video Recap
Posted by Jeff Boedeker - May 21st, 2009 at 07:05:59 amThe Agency Insight Tour 2009
Posted by Michael Albert - May 19th, 2009 at 09:05:49 pm
Allan shows off one of the many t-shirt designs we had on display at the ACORD conference.
After many miles and tons of Insight, the Agent Insight Tour 2009 has officially come to a close. On Friday, the AgencyPort truck pulled on to the floor of the ACORD conference here in Orlando, and we’ve been talking about everything we’ve learned along the way non-stop for two days since exhibit hall sessions started on Sunday. The conference was a huge success for us, and we were thrilled to have so many of you stop by the booth to tell us how much you’d been enjoying our journey. We hope we’ve made it fun, and more importantly, we know we’ve taken away incredible amounts of agent insight that we will factor into our products and carrier customer implementations for a long time to come.
Over the next couple weeks, we’ll be busy compiling our findings from our journey down the east coast into a final report. We’ve captured an immense amount of information along the way – much more than we’ve been able to share with you in the written pieces and ten minute video blogs along the way.
Jeff Boedeker, our fearless and incredibly hard working director/producer/editor/cameraman extraordinaire is working on the final daily video blog now. Expect to see it here on the blog tomorrow. None of us have actually gotten a preview of the video just yet, but he assures us that we’re going out strong with this one.
A sincere, heartfelt thanks goes out from all of us at AgencyPort to the carriers who helped us arrange agency visits, and to all of the agents who were willing to sit down in front of the camera and share their thoughts and insights with us. We know you were taking a leap of faith to open up to strangers with a camera, but it’s your first hand perspective that will help make the agent/carrier systems of the future better than they’ve ever been before. We’re hugely grateful to everyone who has been checking in on the blog and following our video journey along the way. Having such a steady, engaged, audience has been an inspiration.
So now a lonely AgencyPort assault vehicle sits out in the rain in front of the Dolphin hotel awaiting a long journey home to Boston. Packed full of props collected along the way – from the sleeveless, woman’s size large, Orange County Choppers shirts that Steve and Dennis purchased at a truck stop and wore so well on day 12 to a still somewhat damp full ensemble for a marathon-running ex-agent on a mission first introduced to us by Allan and Eric on Day 8 we’re loaded up with almost as much gear as insight.
Behind the scenes at AgencyPort the gears are already turning on how we take this all to the next level. Let’s just say that even though Orlando marks the end of this year’s Agent Insight Tour, this might not be the last time you see us out on the road. On that note, if there are thing you found especially valuable and want to see more of if we do this again, feel free to use the comments section below the post to share your thoughts.
If you’re just now getting a chance to catch up with the Agent Insight Tour, head on back to the beginning and start watching! It’s worth it. We promise.
Thank you from all of us for following along with our journey. We hope you’ll check back for the final video later in the week.
Agency Visits Wrap Up – On to ACORD!
Posted by Chris Merullo - May 15th, 2009 at 06:05:58 amThe last day of agency visits on the Agent Insight Tour 2009 turned out to be a beautiful compared to the previous day’s rain and unexpected five hour drive from Jacksonville to St. Petersburg. With the assault vehicle being sent to get detailed (for fear the two delinquents from Mission Hill and Charlestown would ditch it somewhere) and the cameras put away (to prevent any incriminating evidence), Ken O and Chris M headed for Clearwater in our low key vehicle (growing up in the city you’re taught never to bring attention to yourself).
Our first stop was with Eric Padgas with Swett and Crawford of Florida. This office specializes in Transportation lines. Eric discussed with us his process for submitting new business. He let us know what works and what does not for him. Eric provided some specific feedback for a particular carrier who, as luck would have it, had been visited by the Agent Insight Tour the previous day. The carrier was already working on the improvements he was suggesting.
Insights: As wholesalers, there is a lot of rekeying of data since the agent handwrites the application and sends it to the office. Based on the application, the Underwriter determines where to submit the business and often times has to be rekeyed for each carrier.
When we finished in Clearwater, we headed east to Orlando for the second and final stop. We will most likely be hearing from the authorities since the toll booths at our exit gave us the option of the EZPass and exact change of which we had neither. There was no person to take any money, so you do the math. Making it there unwittingly on fumes, we fueled up. How many AP employees does it take to get gas? Apparently two since it took ten minutes to realize the gas cover had to be pushed in to open it.
Our final meeting was with James McDonald at the Hugh Cotton Insurance INC which writes all the lines you can think of: Commercial, Personal, Health, Life, Employees, etc. Upon arrival we were asked how long the session would take and after stating an hour, we were told we had 15 minutes. Once we were able to convince James that we were not there to sell anything, the air was cleared and he, Vicki, and Laura provided invaluable information.
Insights: There were mixed feelings in regards to carriers for commercial versus personal lines. For one carrier that was loved from a personal lines perspective, it was a nightmare for commercial lines and vice versa for other carriers. Although both lines were automated and both were a pretty much paperless environment, the personal lines automation was more advanced than commercial lines at the carriers with whom they did business.
To quote Ken O’Sullivan: “With the ACORD conference in sight, the AgencyPort vehicle is rolling in loaded with Agent’s insight!”. Now, off to the ACORD Conference we go. Maybe we’ll see you there.