Partner XE agencies are invited to join the NASPA board and SIS team October 4-5, 2012 at the Embassy Suites in Columbus for a day and a half of networking, educational sessions and small group training sessions with SIS and NASPA members. Sessions have been designed to benefit the actual users of the system, as well as the Agency principals.
Conference highlights include guest speakers, Cal Durland, Director of Member Relations, ACORD, Bill Tedrick, CEO, NxTech, Nathaniel Seevers, Social Media Expert, Paul Fuller, EVP – Product Management, SIS and Alex Deak, CEO, SIS. A packed agenda also includes multiple sessions on NASPA approved best practices for your agency using Partner XE and roundtable discussions that will help shape the future of your Partner XE agency management system.
Here’s a sampling of what you can expect:
Best Practices Workflows in Partner XE – Setting your Agency up for Success!
Real Time, Transformation Station, & Weblink – Maximizing the Time you Have Through Real Time!
Agency Accounting Principles and Practice using Partner XE
Social Media Marketing for the Independent Insurance Agent
Making your Producers More Productive – Leveraging Partner XE with Some Great Sales Best Practices
3 Ways to use Your Partner XE Agency Management System to MakeYour Business More Profitable
There are many ways to use the Partner XE Agency Management System to increase profitability for your agency. For starters…
1.) Information, Information, Information
Partner XE has a number of prebuilt reports an agency can run to gain insight to what is happening in their businesses. Don’t see what you want? You can easily create a custom report to get the exact information you are looking for.
Examples of how to use reporting to increase profitability:
Learn which lines of business are most profitable and adjust your marketing to sell more of those lines.
Identify common characteristic of your clients and target more people like them.
Run a Premium by Carrier By Line of Business report to get a good understanding of how you are doing with a certain carrier, where you are selling well, where you are not and if there are other lines of business available that you might be able to focus on.
Identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities and market accordingly.
Determine which of your producers are producing and which are not. Then dig deeper to find out what the high producers are doing that the others are not to teach that throughout your agency
And much more.
All of these reports can easily be exported to Excel with two clicks of the mouse or you can print letters and envelopes for everyone on the list for direct mail marketing campaigns.
2.) Increase Efficiency with Commercial Downloads and Real Time
We are committed to making the lives of our clients easier and more productive. One way Partner XE does that is through the ability to download commercial lines policies – eliminating the need for manual entry and increasing the amount of time you have to focus on sales and customer service.
In addition, thanks to Real Time, agencies using Partner XE can pass client information already entered in their agency management system directly to the carrier website to pre-fill required information, improving accuracy, saving time and freeing up more time for selling.
3.) Track and Monitor Sales and Marketing Efforts with To-Do Lists
The Marketing To-Do List within your Partner XE agency management system can serve several purposes. Most importantly though, the To-Do List will help you keep track of the different stages of your various sales and marketing campaigns. To keep Producers/CSRs on track for each step or follow up, these To-Do Lists have reminders that can be set to show up on your “desktop reminders list” when a follow up is required or scheduled. Since there are often multiple people involved with a single marketing campaign, the To-Do Lists can also be assigned to multiple users so when one person has accomplished their steps they can assign the To-Do List to the next person so they can take over the marketing workflow. In short, no many how many people you are marketing to, no matter how many people on your team, using the To-Do lists correctly will ensure nothing slips through the cracks and everyone is accountable to their own action items – which ultimately should lead to closing more business!
Partner XE from SIS is an easy to use, online hosted insurance agency management system with logical workflows, exceptional download and comparative rater integration capabilities and best in the business Outlook integration. If you are not already using Partner XE and would like to learn why so many agencies are switching to our system, give us a call at 800-747-9273 or fill out a short contact form and we’ll be in touch. You’ll be glad you did.
Love it or hate it, the internet economy and the “need it now” mentality that goes with it is likely here to stay. In this age of constant innovation and increasing technology, independent agencies that will prosper are those that will incorporate new technologies and adapt to new rules, use effective systems and processes to metamorphose around them and harness the power of available productivity tools.
Getting Started
The first step to improving any process is to gain a full understanding of the way it being done now. Many independent insurance agency owners, caught up in the day to day drama of running a business, find it difficult to make time to document procedures to realize the full potential of their agency management system and other tools — and even more difficult to implement and enforce them.
Borrowing from a lean manufacturing philosophy, the primary goals behind implementing documented systems and processes are to identify inefficiencies, reduce time spent on individual transactions, increase productivity (sales), while executing processes that consistently focus on customer value.
If you have not documented your processes and procedures, the first step you’ll need to take is to identify how things are currently being done and map each process from start to finish.
Get your team together to review the processes and collectively identify information bottlenecks and areas for improvement that are negatively affecting your bottom line.
Get input from the entire team on the areas where improvement could most directly affect their ability to sell more.
Prioritize improvements based on ease of implementation and overall impact.
The 6 Stages of Business Process Improvement
Once you have documented your processes you can focus on improving them. As indicated in the Harvard Business Press’ “Pocket Mentor: Improving Business Processes”1 a business process improvement cycle has six stages. Although complex improvements will take more time at each stage than simple process improvements, the stages apply to both.
Plan
What is your overall goal driving the need for improvement?
Analyze
Do you have documented workflows that leverage your technology?
Are these workflows built into your technology?
Redesign
Adjust documentation of procedures to reflect new goals/ processes
Acquire Resources
Is there technology available to improve this process?
Can I outsource activities ( like marketing) and ultimately improve my bottom line?
Implement
Continually Improve
Review processes regularly (at least once a year) to insure you are taking advantage of all available resources.
In analyzing your current workflow, you may find that simple, yet effective, adjustments can be made just by getting everyone in the office to uniformly take advantage of tools you already have (like a digital document storage system, Real Time or a uniform to-do list. You may also find that you don’t have the necessary tools or resources to get things done and need to make some adjustments.
Partner XE from SIS – an online hosted, feature rich, affordable, easy to use, scalable agency management system designed to streamline workflow and increase productivity for independent insurance agencies of all sizes gives agencies the tools they need to succeed.
Find out why so many independent insurance agencies are switching to the Partner XE agency management system. Call 800-747-9273 or click here to schedule a free agency management system assessment and consultation.
Resources
[1] Harvard Business Press. Pocket Mentor: Improving Business Process. Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2010.
Many independent insurance agents are challenged with the inefficiency that comes from dealing with different carrier interfaces. Duplicate entry, multiple passwords and too much time spent on training waste both time and money. One way to simplify processes is to adopt new workflows and /or systems that leverage Real Time tools.
To help get the word about the benefits of Real Time, there is a widespread initiative afoot known as the Real Time/ Download Campaign (www.getrealtime.org). The Real Time campaign is dedicated to improving the competitiveness of the independent agency distribution channel through a streamlined and efficient workflow approach.
Increased efficiency = more time for selling
As the following figures put out in a recent Real Time Campaign Statement indicate, a large number of agency management system users (63%) are already employing Real Time to access multiple carriers at once for a significant increase in productivity. Consider:
The use of Real Time rating tools for personal lines saves agencies an estimated 68 minutes per employee per day.
About three fifths (62 percent) of those using Real Time rating also use Real Time inquiry and service transactions through agency management systems.
Real Time inquiry and servicing are saving 50 minutes daily for those employees using the functionality.
Room for improvement
Turn those figures around though and a full 37% of those surveyed are NOT taking advantage of the benefits of Real Time. Whether this is because they are working with agency management systems that do not employ the technology or whether they are just hesitant to use it is not clear. Regardless, for an agency looking to curb inefficiency, the use of Real Time should be part of day-to-day business operations.
Employ best practices
For those who have Real Time capability, but just aren’t sure how to use it most efficiently, we’d like to share Agency Real-Time “Best Practice” Workflows & Implementation Strategies, recently published by the Get Real Time campaign and touted as “ a road map for implementing ‘best practice’ real-time workflows.”
The time is now
For those not using Real Time, there is no better time than the present. As Daniel Burrus, CEO of Burrus Research, a research and consulting firm that monitors global advancements in technology driven trends, wrote in The High Risk of Wait and See, “One thing that’s certain regardless of industry or profession is that we have massive business process transformation taking place. Which processes? Virtually all of them: purchasing, logistics, accounting, sales, marketing, communications, collaboration, innovating, educating, training, managing, releasing new products, engaging our employees…the list is endless. We’re transforming all of these things plus more, and if you don’t initiate the transformation, someone else will.”
Find the right agency management system
If you are using an agency management system that does not support Real Time, consider switching to Partner XE from SIS, a feature rich, affordable, easy to use, scalable agency management system designed to streamline workflow and increase productivity. With Partner XE and Real Time you’ll be closer than ever to straight through processing.
Find out why so many agencies have been switching to Partner XE insurance agency management system from SIS. Call 800-747-9273 or click here to get in touch with a representative.
Capitalize on New Technology to Improve Business Processes
While it would be nice to think that we are all perfect, there are very few, if any, organizations that operate at a level of 100% efficiency – and as more and more technology is introduced, the higher that bar becomes. The trick is keeping up, making the most of what is available and knowing when it is time to reevaluate, find something better and improve business processes.
For the average independent insurance agent, for example, there was a time when the Franklin Planner was the best way to track appointments – then came Outlook, and then the ability to sync Outlook directly to your agency management system. There was a time when using carrier websites to transfer data was the most efficient way of doing things – then came Real Time. There was time when an in-house server was the way to go – then came the cloud. The list goes on.
Change as Opportunity
The trick is knowing when it makes sense to adopt new technology as a way to improve business processes and knowing when to stick with what you have. It is also in investing in technology that will continue to be updated as a matter of course – without a lot of thought or work on your end.
In “The High Risk of Wait and See,” Daniel Burrus, CEO of Burrus Research argues for adoption, stating that, “When you start looking at the certainties around you (which point to opportunities), rather than focusing on the uncertainties (which point to risks), you can see how detrimental a “wait and see” approach can be—how you’re actually missing major new opportunities for sales and growth.”
Analyze Business Processes
When uncertain about adopting a new technology or way of doing business, a business process plan/ analysis is a good place to start. At the get go, it will help you identify inefficiencies, define problem points and identify areas for improvement. It will also help you as you move into the adaptation of new business processes should you choose to do so.
As Michael Hammer wrote in his HBR blog, The Process Audit, “In virtually every industry, companies of all sizes have achieved extraordinary improvements in cost, quality, speed, profitability, and other key areas by focusing on, measuring, and redesigning their customer-facing and internal processes.”
Improve Effectiveness
Business Process Improvement is really about changing business processes to improve effectiveness. From a technology standpoint, this could translate to upgrading to new systems or programs. It could also translate into merely learning to properly use the tools you already have.
As an independent insurance agency, questions to consider might be:
As an organization are we making the most of the tools we have available to us?
Are we benefiting from the flexibility and scalability afforded by the cloud?
Am I able to give my employees access to the information they need?
Am I able to access critical information I need for my business?
Are we using Real Time technology to its fullest?
Can I get access to accurate information in one place…for all my carriers?
Is my system scalable and easy to train on?
Depending on your answers, you may find that you HAVE the technology you need, you are just not using it. You may also find that the system you have is nowhere near as efficient as it could be.
Partner Effectively
When considering an agency management system, the answer to some of those questions lies in the feature the product offers, the answer to others lies in your agency management system partner’s commitment to understanding the evolving needs of an independent agent and whether or not they embrace an environment of continuous improvement. For more details on how to find a partner that’s right for you, see our post Evaluating Your Provider.
SIS is that insurance agency management system partner – stable, committed, progressive, responsive and independent.
Find out why so many agencies have been switching to Partner XE insurance agency management system from SIS. Call 800-747-9273 or click here to get in touch with a representative.
Read how independent insurance agency owner John Horvath made the most of community connections and technology to put his agency on the path to success.
