You’ve read the reasons to become a paperless insurance agency. The time, money, and environmental savings are just the tip of the iceberg. Bottom line: a paperless agency serves customers better.
Enacting the Right Agency Policies
So, what are you waiting for? Ah, yes. A plan. We suggest starting out the road to paperless with the following agency-wide policies:
- Eliminate paper from internal documents: This is the easiest place to begin as it’s where you have the most control. Start sending meeting agendas electronically and have a note-taker email minutes afterward. Move memos to online-only. And, get your team to put internal documents on a shared drive rather than printing and handing out.
See where to start your transition with these Top 5 Processes that Need to be Paperless
- Remove paper from policies: Move the policy process away from paper with digital, fillable forms. Thanks to recent technological advances, you can easily convert forms to fillable PDFs right in Adobe Acrobat. Add in secure esignatures and you’ve easily made the whole process electronic. Policies can now be processed in almost instantly.
- Lean on your management system: You’ve already got one of the best tools to create a paperless environment. Start using your management system to hold all customer information by scanning in current paper documents and utilizing your management system’s document storage capabilities. Save yourself the scanning step and leverage your system’s email integration to automatically link documents to customer profiles.
Get tips on other ways to bring efficiency to your independent agency
Getting Staff Buy-In
You can’t create a paperless agency on your own. Getting staff on board can be more of a challenge than enacting the processes themselves. The best advice is to be honest, go slow, and listen to your staff to make sure everyone is working together to change agency operations.
- Be transparent about why it’s important to move away from paper-centric processes.
- Educate your staff on the time and money saving benefits of paperless.
- Start with one process and work to make it part of agency workflow. Give each new process about a month to settle in before moving to the next.
- Train staff on new processes, especially for those involving potentially unfamiliar technology such as esignatures or document scanning and storage.
Find out how SIS works with our partner agencies to provide targeted management system trainings
Bringing in Your Management System Provider
Your management system provider can be instrumental in bringing your agency into a paper-free world. Get in touch to find out about paperless capabilities, including integrated systems that can sync information within your system without having to print a single document.
Your provider can also set up targeted trainings to get your team up to speed on new capabilities and provide needed refreshers on current tools. At SIS, we regularly meet with our partner agencies to provide Regional Learnings and agency-specific trainings to keep users up-to-date and fully informed on how our Partner XE system can build efficiencies in their agencies.
Want to find out how SIS and Partner XE can help your agency go paperless? Contact us at [email protected] or 800.747.7005, Option 6.
Sarah Deak has been contributing to the SIS team since 2013, covering topics like agency perpetuation, workflow improvements, data security, and marketing. She has a background in small business, working with organizations to improve their online presence and client engagement. Sarah also writes for the SIS newsletters and website, and counts herself lucky to hear from our many passionate, hard-working clients for our client stories. Her favorite part about working for SIS are the dedicated, service-minded people.