Bringing clarity to every role in the agency
By Anupam Gupta
Digging through piles of paper reports or wrestling with spreadsheets just to figure out what is really going on in your insurance agency feels a bit like trying to find a specific document in a chaotic, unorganized office. It is time-consuming, frustrating, and often leaves you without the clear picture you need.
The good news is that the era of data clutter is giving way to a new age of streamlined business intelligence, thanks to modern data visualization tools integrated within agency management systems. These tools aren’t just about seeing numbers; they are about making data instantly relevant, accessible, and actionable for everyone in the agency.
Data visualization is transforming how agencies operate, enhancing both daily efficiency and long-term strategic decisions. Instead of sifting through vast amounts of inconsequential data, team members can now access exactly the insights relevant to their role. This saves valuable time and allows for quicker answers to important questions, enabling insights to be shared across the team with ease.
Let’s take a look at how this data insights revolution is unfolding across different desks within the agency.
Leading with insight
Agency owners and principals must have a clear and comprehensive view of their business to keep the entire operation running smoothly. They need a perfectly organized command center. Data visualization tools provide easy access to crucial information regarding growth, profitability, and retention, all in one place, helping owners track the overall health of their agency. This top-level view can be further organized to show how individual branches or departments are performing.
Understanding the agency’s financial health and sales pipeline is key to strategic decision-making. Data insights allow owners to examine sales and opportunity highlights, such as how customer revenue breaks down, which opportunities were won or lost, and performance across producers, departments, and branches. This view helps guide future choices and allows for prompt adjustments if issues arise.
Owners can even tidy up their understanding of carrier relationships, quickly seeing which carriers are preferred based on premium, which are handling new or renewal business, and their hit rates for the agency.
Putting data insights to work in your agency
translates directly into the ability to grow revenue,
improve efficiency, and ultimately, improve the customer experience.
Organizing the team’s workload
Managers across the agency benefit immensely from data-driven insights. Department managers can gain clear visibility into their team’s workload and the business they manage, including clients, policies, and lines of business. Insights into customer retention and expiring policies help managers understand the health of their team’s book of business and ensure agency goals remain on track.
By looking at work effort and overdue activities, managers can get organized around team productivity and capacity. They can even spot and correct lopsided workloads by reviewing individual employee book size and retention rankings.
Sales managers can analyze the sales pipeline data, focusing on recent wins and upcoming opportunities to understand team performance. They can dive deeper into specifics like customer mix, retention breakdowns, and growth areas by business line or policy. Data insights also help sales managers gain a better understanding of team revenue growth, profitability, and progress towards goals, including revenue breakdowns by average and trending revenue per customer.
Structuring the bottom line
Data insights are the ultimate resource for the accounting department to manage finances and ensure accuracy. Accountants can easily manage cash flow by having visibility into money moving in and out of the agency, with near-real-time transaction details like client payments, carrier payments, and expenses.
Data insights also help control data quality affecting accounting workflows, ensuring the accuracy of entries and avoiding incorrect financials with insights across general ledger entries, commissions, account balances, and transactions.
With all this information meticulously organized and analyzed, the accounting department can easily understand and report the business’s financial health and performance to leadership using insights into revenue breakdowns by carriers and producers, profits and losses, and expense trends.
Powering client connections
Client-facing roles are the heart of the agency, and having easily accessible data insights is key to nurturing those relationships and driving sales. Account managers and service representatives can use these insights to efficiently organize their day by easily seeing where their time should be focused.
Having a clear view of upcoming and overdue activities in the agency management system helps prioritize tasks. This is especially valuable for renewals, as easily seeing expiring policies allows the team to organize their efforts around the most urgent tasks.
Producers can keep their pipeline organized and maintain a clear view of customer relationships. Visibility into revenue composition and key activities helps them focus on tasks that drive sales.
By seeing the agency’s largest customers and highest-value industries based on revenue, and how these rankings change over time, producers can organize their efforts to focus on the best opportunities. Combining this with the ability to monitor upcoming and new business activities allows producers to understand the health of their pipeline and get an accurate picture of progress towards goals.
Building a stronger digital framework
The IT team plays a critical role in keeping the entire agency’s systems running smoothly. Data visualization tools help IT administrators with essential tasks such as monitoring user logins to quickly identify when and how often users log in and who might be having problems doing so.
In an age of constant security threats, keeping the agency’s digital environment secure is paramount. Visualization tools also help IT teams more efficiently monitor security changes and data integrity to effectively meet organizational compliance standards, audit security permissions, and spot trends in data quality across the agency.
Data insights: The blueprint for a high-performing agency
Providing all roles within an agency access to data visualization tools can be like giving everyone their own personalized, perfectly organized workspace, allowing them to easily delve into the specifics of their business areas, teams, and workflows. Putting data insights to work in your agency translates directly into the ability to grow revenue, improve efficiency, and ultimately, improve the customer experience.
The days of data chaos are fading, replaced by an era where data is the key to a high-performing agency.
The author
Anupam Gupta is chief product officer at Applied Systems Inc. He is responsible for the company’s product vision and product management teams. Anupam was formerly CPO at 4C Insights, a sophisticated data and analytics SaaS provider to the AdTech/MarTech industries (which was acquired by Mediaocean, the mission-critical platform for omnichannel advertising with more than $200 billion in annualized media spend managed through its software) connecting the ecosystem of agencies, brands, media, technology, and data. As CPO of the combined companies, he spearheaded their product transformation to the cloud, adding new products fueled by data and intelligence infused in the core workflow. Previously, he led product organizations for several tech companies, including Vubiquity, Mixpo, and Microsoft among others.
