Technology
Walk the talk
Three agents highlight how adopting real time business processing made their already successful agencyies better
By Nancy Doucette
Agency President and Manager Mark Stolly, CPCU, CIC, knew about AMS TransactNOW® and real time business processing but confesses that initially he really didn’t pay much attention to it. He had an agency to run. Stolly Insurance Group was founded in 1904. Today, it has 45 employees and four locations in West Central Ohio. Mark Stolly and his three brothers represent the fourth generation of the multigenerational agency. The overall revenue is roughly 60% commercial lines, 20% personal lines and 20% life/health and benefits.
Stolly started paying attention when the personal lines manager in the agency’s main office in Lima, Ohio, was moved to one of the other offices. He stepped in to manage the personal lines department. At about the same time, he was becoming more involved on the Industry Affairs Committee for The AMS Users’ Group. “I needed to ‘walk the talk.’ This was a great opportunity for me to see how real time would help with personal lines,” he recalls.
That was nearly two years ago. He can still remember, though, that it took the nine-person staff of the personal lines department in the Lima office about six weeks to get comfortable with the real time workflows and procedures. During that timeframe the agency went from not using TransactNOW at all to averaging more than 1,000 transactions per month through TransactNOW.
AMS TransactNOW provides a real time, single-entry workflow for carrier interface transactions without leaving the management system, eliminating duplicate entry on inquiries, endorsements, or whatever. It’s free to AMS agency management system users.
Many of those transactions were inquiries, Stolly reports. Presently, 12 of the agency’s carriers offer real time capabilities with more than 70 activities used on a daily basis.
The claims department is now using TransactNOW as well, and it’s being introduced to commercial lines.
Stolly gives regional insurer Westfield high marks for the breadth of its real time offerings. “Their support and communication have helped us reach this new level of service,” he says. “We can do personal lines and commercial lines billing, policy and claims inquiries. We can also do endorsements. Not all of our carriers offer that many activities but they all offer inquiries. Quotes and endorsements are works in progress for our other carriers.”
The inquiry capabilities enhance customer service, Stolly says. He recalls one of his recent client visits during which he needed to get an update on an open claim. “I called one of our claims people and asked if the reserve had been changed or if there had been a payment. She provided me the answer on the spot using TransactNOW. It took about 15 seconds.”
With a growing list of tasks being accomplished in a blink of an eye, Stolly laid out several goals for the personal lines department in 2007. At the top of the list was “proactive phone calls.” “We set the annual goal at 800 proactive telephone calls. That breaks down to about two calls a week per CSA,” Stolly explains. “A proactive call is one made to a client whom we haven’t had contact with in a while—they pay on time, haven’t had any changes in coverage, no claims.
“We created a ‘proactive’ activity in our AfW Online system so that we can monitor this,” he continues. “Every month we sit down as a group and we review how many proactive calls each one of us made and whether we made our goal.” Stolly points out that he too is making proactive calls. “If I’m going to ask the CSAs to do this, I have to demonstrate that I can do it as well. So that at the end of the month when we have people who didn’t reach the goals, I can ask ‘why not?’ and understand their response. We’ve hit our goal just about every month.”
Initially, he recalls, making these proactive calls was intimidating for the CSAs because it was outside their comfort zone. But with practice comes success. “I’ve seen a dramatic change in the attitude our CSAs have toward our customers. They have a ‘bring it on’ attitude.”
A byproduct of the proactive calls is account rounding. While the CSAs are contacting customers proactively, they’re uncovering sales opportunities for which they are rewarded. Of course there are also opportunities to save customers some money as well. So an additional objective of these proactive calls is to maintain the personal lines volume.
Overall, bringing real time into the agency has had far-reaching effects. “We’ve changed our vocabulary to some extent,” Stolly says. “We no longer refer to ourselves as insurance agents. We define ourselves as consultants. We’re problem solvers and respond to client needs. If we can do these things on a ‘proactive’ basis rather than on a ‘reactive’ basis, it’s better all the way around. And the customer doesn’t get that level of service from a direct writer,” Stolly concludes.
Real time instigator
Stu Durland describes himself as “the real time instigator” for his family-owned agency, but that’s not the title you’ll see on his business card. Officially, he’s co-owner of Seely & Durland, Inc., located in Warwick, New York, and vice president of operations. The split of business is about 55% commercial lines and 45% personal lines. There’s a staff of nine which includes three client relation professionals. More on the client relation professionals in a bit.
For Durland, embracing real time was a “given” in that he is a past president of the Applied Systems Client Network (ASCnet), the association for users of Applied Systems’ TAM and Vision products. He continues his involvement in ASCnet through his participation on the Interface Committee. That helps him keep up to date on real time and download developments as well.
“As soon as a carrier announces its real time capabilities, we’re on board,” Durland says. “So we’ve been working in a real time environment for three or four years. I was familiar with what the dollar savings were.” Those dollar savings were revealed in ASCnet’s “Real Time Study” which was released in 2002. The study compared the time it takes to do an activity using the agency management system and Transformation Station (the “new way”) with the time it takes to go to the carrier Web site, do that same task and then return to the agency management system to document the activity (the “old way”). An outgrowth of that study was a real time calculator which is available at www.getrealtime.org. Durland encourages agency principals who aren’t sure whether real time can make a difference in their shops to use the calculator.
Implementing real time workflows and procedures left the Seely & Durland staff with time on their hands. “We’re saving time,” Durland says. “We needed to become more of a sales culture. So we spent about eight months developing ideas on how we were going to do that.” What resulted was revamping the CSR job description and pay structure. The result was a new position: the customer relation professional (CRP).
The agency has two personal lines CRPs and one commercial lines CRP. A greater percentage of their pay is based on how much they sell, he explains. CRPs have no processing responsi-bilities. There is now a CRP assistant who handles certificates, ID cards, etc., and another more experienced individual who handles the personal lines processing and claims.
The agency set goals for the CRPs that include an increase in policies in force as well as overall growth and policies per client. “We have a huge white board where we post our goals,” Durland says. “Whenever a CRP writes a new piece of business or rounds an account, they note it on the board. There are prizes for folks who beat their goals.”
In the beginning, though, “it was a scary time,” Durland remembers. “We had meetings and PowerPoint presentations to try to reassure our staff that there was no need for concern. But the fact of the matter was, we were going to set them up at a slightly lower salary. To offset that we included a draw for one year.” The PowerPoint presentations reflected the business that they had written the previous year. Using those numbers, Durland projected potential sales for the CRPs the coming year. They had the potential of making a good deal more than the usual 2% to 5% increase they would receive from a performance review.
“We changed the whole environ-ment,” he says. After a year of working with these new responsibilities and pay structure, the staff is comfortable with the new approach. “They see that this makes a lot of sense,” Durland adds.
Savvy agency principals understand that CSRs, CSAs, and CRPs drive workflows, he continues, and if those workflows aren’t smooth and consistent, they won’t get used. “Agency principals must make a conscious effort with respect to implementation. You can’t just send out an e-mail to staff and say: ‘Real time is available.’ You need to sit down with your staff and show them how it works.” He says ASCnet’s Real Time Task Force is creating some workflow documents that are specific to Applied Systems’ management systems. So for agents who haven’t been in the trenches to the extent that Durland has, help is on the way.
But even when workflows are smooth and consistent, activities need to be tracked to be sure that staff is using workflows consistently. “Our Applied System automatically creates an activity whenever you do a Transformation Station function,” Durland explains. “I can generate a report detailing those activities. The staff knows that we review the report. So if I see that someone did only one billing inquiry in a given period, I can inquire about that. Not to pick on that person but to be sure that the system is working satisfactorily.”
Comparing the agency’s real time usage this year to last, he says real time activities are up by 13%. “That doesn’t sound like a huge number, but we’ve been involved with real time for a while. Most of our major carriers—national and regional—offer multiple inquiry capabilities. More carriers are coming onboard with more Transformation Station functions—endorsements for instance.” To find out which carriers are offering which real time capabilities, Durland recommends a visit to www.getrealtime.org—the official site for the Real Time/Download Campaign or www.ACTtech.org—provided by the Agents Council for Technology.
A strong advocate
If you’re looking for a strong advocate for technology, Ed Higgins is probably your guy. The owner of Thousand Islands Agency in Clayton, New York, Higgins is a 30-year veteran of the industry. He went live on a Redshaw Automation System in 1983. He implemented transactional filing in 1990, then moved to scanning in 2002 and the agency is now totally paperless. The six-person staff uses triple monitors and a voice over IP phone system. Higgins recently upgraded the agency’s management system from ebixOne to ebixASP.
Higgins doesn’t keep his zeal for technology to himself. He is the former chair of the Agents Council for Technology and writes regularly for “The Automated Agency Report.”
Higgins explains that the staff is split between two locations. With the mix of business being about 60% personal lines and 40% commer-cial lines, he says he’d need 10 people if the agency didn’t have the level of technology it does. Another plus to having everything in the agency available electronically: “You have your agency with you no matter where you are,” he says.
He acknowledges that investing in technology is expensive, but the upside of those investments is that Thousand Islands Agency has been a Best Practices agency for 11 of 14 years.
“We’ve had zero backlog for some time,” Higgins notes. “We don’t have backlog because we get the work done faster.”
He attributes getting work done faster in part to real time. But if your vendor can’t perform real time functions, you can’t either. Back in 2002, he and other ebix users were pressing ebix to provide real time capabilities. “We knew that, conceptually, if you could do something in 15 to 30 seconds that used to take 5 to 10 minutes to accomplish with phone tag, etc., real time was an enhancement that we needed to have,” he says. “Don’t allow your vendor to hold you back,” he declares. “ebix was slow to react, but by the end of 2004, ebix licensed Transformation Station.”
Higgins says that having real time capabilities is important enough to include mention of it in the interview process with potential new carriers. “We just appointed three carriers,” he reports. “One of the questions we include in our interview process is: ‘Do you support real time, and what do you expect your future participation in the real time environment to be?’
“Now that we have real time capabilities we have a new attitude as to who we do business with. So if a carrier isn’t going to offer download/real time capability in their horizon plan, they won’t be part of our long-term landscape,” he continues. “They may stay on our roster because certain carriers serve certain segments of the marketplace that we need to serve. But they won’t be one of the top players. The reality is that CSRs are the ones who, on a daily activity level, place a lot of the business for the agency. They’ll use the process that is quickest.”
The business case for real time is simple, Higgins says. “You want to give your customer better service.” When an agency is just beginning to move in the direction of real time, though, CSRs may not believe that working in a real time environment is, in fact, quicker than going directly to carrier Web sites. Change is difficult. So Higgins urges principals to pay attention to transaction numbers. One of the CSRs in his agency was dabbling in real time—doing three real time transactions in the sample month—compared to the 30 to 50 transactions that other CSRs with a similar workload were doing. She was doing the balance of her transactions the old way. “It wasn’t that she didn’t buy into the idea of real time,” Higgins says. “It was simply a matter of comfort. She believed her way was quicker.”
So Higgins grabbed a stopwatch. He timed the CSR doing the task using her process. The CSR timed Higgins as he did the same process using Transformation Station. Transformation Station was quicker. “Once people understand that it isn’t about you—it’s about the process and the speed, they want to do tasks faster,” he points out.
“You’re running a business and the faster you can do tasks, the more time you have to do other tasks. If you do it right, you’ll use that extra time to sell more business. Or in a worst-case scenario, you have more time to offer your existing customers more coverage. If they choose to buy it, you make more money. If they choose not to buy it, you’ve locked the E&O door.
“The E&O attorneys tell us that the best E&O activity you can do is to offer people more coverage and explain it to them,” he continues. “That’s what independent agents are uniquely qualified to do. We’re educated, we can offer people choice because we represent different carriers and we have the relationship with the customer. You can’t do that unless you’ve found some way to make the other activities in the agency happen more quickly.”
Higgins concludes: “Real time is a business issue—not a technology issue. It’s about profitability and competitive advantage. Real time provides a fun/freedom factor. You can get back to the sales process and consulting with people about coverage. It makes running an insurance agency easier.”
For more information
Real Time/Download Campaign
Web site: www.getrealtime.org