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TECHNOLOGY Overwhelmed by e-mail? E-mail overload affects more than the bottom line By Nancy Doucette Professor Harold Hill in “The Music Man” proclaimed: “We got trouble, right here in River City. Trouble with a capital T.” In the agency ranks, that capital T rhymes with E—and that stands for e-mail. With our increasing dependence on e-mail as a communication mode, the effects of e-mail overload have a physical, emotional, and social impact. And those impacts most certainly affect an agency’s bottom line. Don’t believe it? Touch base with industry veteran Becky Clegg, AIT, AAM, CPIW, who recently spent three months observing 14 customer service representatives in several agencies in the Pacific Northwest. Clegg has been doing her thesis research on the effects of what has come to be known as e-mail overload. What resulted was a 100-page study that examines the effects of e-mail overload on productivity, health, and social behaviors of insurance agency customer service workers. Each CSR’s personality, perception, tolerance, and tasks influenced his or her reaction to the stress that e-mail overload induces. And while Clegg’s sample is small, it is nonetheless representative. With that in mind, it’s wise for agency owners and principals to address the e-mail overload situation because in Clegg’s sample, half of her subjects reported they were approaching burnout or were ready to leave the agency. (More from Clegg’s research appears in the sidebar.) When you meet Clegg for the first time, chances are she’ll tell you that she’s been in the insurance business since she was seven years old. She earned her allowance working in her father’s Allstate agency. In her adult life, she and her husband had an Allstate agency in Idaho after they returned from a stint in the Bahamas where she ran computer operations for a naval tracking system. When Allstate wanted to promote Clegg and have her relocate to another part of the country, she decided it was time for a change. “No way was I going to leave the Pacific Northwest,” she says. So she went to work as a field trainer for a Coeur d’Alene, Idaho-based company that produced a product called PS4. Eventually, that company was acquired by AMS. Clegg says she wore many hats during her 15 years with AMS and enjoyed working closely with scores of agencies in the United States and Canada. But, about two years ago, she left AMS to work with her husband in their company, WEST Consulting, Inc., in Coeur d’Alene, and so she could devote time to her research. They still consult for AMS on PS4, AMS 360, and other AMS products. All Clegg’s experience had left her wondering whether technology really was making people more efficient. On a personal level, she was feeling overwhelmed by the 150 to 200 e-mails she was receiving each day. “I would go on vacation and take my computer with me so the e-mails wouldn’t accumulate. That was nuts,” she says. Her conversations with friends during local Insurance Women’s meetings convinced her that she wasn’t alone. “Many of my buddies told me that they were feeling stressed because of increased e-mail usage. They were working late and on weekends, and were missing Insurance Women’s meetings because of a backlog which they attributed, in part, to e-mail,” Clegg remembers. Hot topic Laura Nettles, founder and owner of Nettles Consulting Network, Inc., an Atlanta, Georgia-based firm that helps agencies integrate practical workflows with technology, reports that e-mail management has been the hot topic for the past 18 months or so. “An unmanageable backlog of work is the usual symptom of e-mail overload,” she notes. “When an agency principal contacts me seeking help with the problem, he or she will tell me: ‘We’ve hired more people. That didn’t help.’ “Most of the agencies that contact me have kept current with their technology. Their people are well-trained; they’re generally ‘power users.’ The problem is that with new technologies, workflows need to change. And in many cases, I find that organizations have outgrown their workflows.” Outdated workflows may be the byproduct of what Clegg describes as a “piling on” effect of communication technology. Who could have predicted that e-mail would become the “killer application” that it has? “In earlier eras,” Clegg explains, “innovations such as the printing press diminished the demand for scribes. That’s not been the case as new means and modes of electronic communication have become available. None of the communication methods that have been in use for a long time—clients dropping by the office, surface mail, phone, fax, copy machine—have gone away. Instead we’ve piled on new communication tools—e-mail, e-fax, text messages, and scanners.” “People are totally overwhelmed and confused because of the different ways that information comes to them,” Nettles acknowledges. “One minute they receive a fax, then they receive a phone call, then an e-mail arrives. If well-defined standards aren’t in place, CSRs aren’t sure how to document the transaction.” So Nettles draws on her 25-plus years in the industry to help agencies manage their communication more effectively—not just e-mail. It begins by taking the source of the transaction out of the transaction, she explains. For example, all endorsements are handled the same way, regardless of whether the request originates as paper or electronically. “Well-defined workflows provide standards for where you document what, how you document it, and how you code it so you can retrieve it later,” Nettles notes. But, she says, documenting e-mail creates extra steps because the agency management systems she’s familiar with don’t easily interact with Outlook. In order to attach an e-mail to a client record in most management systems, CSRs are forced to create a new transaction. To streamline this process, Nettles recommends that agencies take a close look at what she calls “over-documenting.” “This is when you summarize e-mail you are attaching in the description field of the attachment. Instead, simply indicate ‘e-mail regarding (fill in the blank) is attached.’ This eliminates a lot of redundancy. “Another recommendation,” Nettles continues, “is to not save outbound e-mails where you are attaching documents from your agency management system—like an application or change request. Instead, document in the activity—already a part of the workflow—that the app or change request was e-mailed to carrier. There is no need to save the e-mail with a duplicate of the document. It’s stored in the agency management system. “Of course the key is that everybody in the agency has to adhere to these guidelines,” she emphasizes. “Standards like these make it possible for CSRs to handle each others’ desks.” With that in mind, however, Nettles points out that there are no right or wrong standards. “But when there’s no standard, that’s a problem,” she says. “It’s critical to bring about change from within the organization,” she continues. So Nettles asks the CSRs to describe the activities related to particular transactions. Based on that discussion, a transaction description is agreed upon and it becomes part of the agency’s published documentation. In the process, all the objections that CSRs have had with respect to why technology doesn’t work for them disappear, she says, because they’re defining the extent to which they’re willing to use the technology. “These changes aren’t global changes,” she emphasizes. “The standards have to be developed and they have to be documented, but they don’t necessarily have to be uniform for every workflow in your office. We approach it by workflow. In other words, the standard that would apply to in-force policies is not the same standard that would apply in the marketing cycle until you bind coverage.” It’s a process “Workflow implementation is a process, not a project,” Nettles points out. “It’s never finished. It never stops. Every time you make a change to your technology, you have to go back and update your workflow and your documentation. So the discussion is ongoing to make sure everybody is clear about why you made the adjustment you did.” To maintain the momentum, good leadership is essential, she says. That leadership doesn’t have to come from the agency owner or principal, but their support of the process is key. Part of the workflow implementa-tion process includes comprehensive workflow audits. Nettles says there are three levels: (1) a backlog audit, (2) a transaction audit, and (3) a workflow audit. “The backlog needs to be monitored on either a monthly or quarterly basis,” she says. The transaction audit provides a picture of the number of transactions flowing through the management system. Leadership can tell which people aren’t following the guidelines. “Most significantly, they’re not documenting and flowing things through your system,” she continues. “It’s easy to do your work without doing it on the system.” As for the workflow audit, Nettles says she’s developed a system where leadership can score staff based on their compliance with the workflows as they’re written. “We aim for 85% compliance the first time around with a goal of 95% compliance,” she explains. “We do those quarterly. The first people we audit are those who didn’t do so well on the transaction audit.” Manage your inbox Both Nettles and Clegg agree that an individual’s e-mail inbox should be viewed in a similar fashion to a physical mailbox. It should be used to retrieve messages (envelopes). Those messages should then be destroyed or saved in a designated folder, not stored in the inbox for future reference. Nettles recommends creating a junk e-mail folder to temporarily store communication that doesn’t pertain to a particular account. “When you open your e-mails, there are going to be those that you need to look at on a later date. Drag those to your junk e-mail folder. You’d keep communica-tion from a client or carrier in your inbox, knowing that it had to be handled in a certain amount of time, according to the agency standard. “The key to managing your inbox,” Nettles adds, “is that as you touch each e-mail, you must process and attach it to a client record. When we establish standards, we decide on how many hours or days a message may remain in the inbox. But we do it one workflow at a time. For instance, endorsement transactions have a different response time than certificate requests. And we monitor that as part of the backlog audit. “Keep in mind that e-mail never really goes away,” Nettles says. “So should something be deleted that the agency needs to retrieve later, it can be located on the e-mail server. And if someone needs to find something in a hurry, it will be in the sent mailbox, which is retained for 90 days. Most transactions are completed in that timeframe.” *
For more information: WEST Consulting, Inc. |
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