The Digital Insurer: Enhancing agency channels
Insight on broker and agent networks is enabling insurers to identify opportunities and build strong relationships with their star performers
Managing a network of agents and brokers brings its own challenges. As well as staying informed on the performance of agents, insurers need to develop relationships with their strongest performers and provide the resources that will enable all agents to sell more. That’s no small feat, especially when your agents are geographically distributed, they’re using their own mobile devices and you’re competing with other carriers for their attention.
It’s a familiar challenge to Tap Haley, insurance industry director at Hitachi Solutions. “Surprisingly, a lot of carriers still struggle to achieve a 360-degree view of the agent, as well as of the insured,” he says. “Some of the carriers we’ve worked with have really struggled to understand who their key agents are, until they implemented an insight system. They don’t know which agents are doing the most business for them, how to track their agents’ communications or how to make sure their meetings with agents have real substance. That makes it very difficult for a carrier to be effective at marketing and selling to the insured. It makes them ineffective at managing how they are perceived by the agents they depend on to sell their products.”
In addition, Haley says that disconnected sales, marketing and customer services information is impacting many insurers. “If an agent is unaware of the advertising campaign a customer is referring to, that hurts their credibility and could lose the sale. It also means that insurers can’t see whether their marketing investment was worthwhile. By joining up those systems, insurers can make sure agents have up-to-date information on the latest campaigns, and they can track return on investment on those campaigns from lead to revenue.”
“Insurance carriers are trying to stand out in a crowded market and differentiate themselves in the eyes of their customers and agents,” says Chad Hamblin, global industry director, financial services at Microsoft Business Solutions. “An independent agent will not necessarily be loyal to any one insurer, and insurers are realizing that they also need to treat agents like customers. This is a two-part process: insurers need to better enable the agent to sell their products and services, and they need to help the agent to develop.”
Increasingly, insurers are using distributor relationship management solutions to pull together data and deliver a 360-degree view of their agents, giving them a clear picture of how they can best support them. “Carriers have a lot of data stored in different systems and the last thing they want to do is add another one,” explains Haley. “But they do want to bring together all the information from their existing systems and that’s where solutions built on customer relationship management (CRM) technologies provide real strength. They act as an aggregator for all that data that is locked away in disparate systems, putting it in the hands of the people who need to act on it.
“For example, Hitachi Solutions’ CRM for Insurance solution, built on Microsoft Dynamics CRM, includes a distributor relationship management module that can capture agents’ performance such as submissions by month, premiums by month, loss ratios and hit ratios, which are all data elements that traditionally live in other systems. A territory manager can quickly identify all the agents in their territory that are above or below the stated goal for the year. They can start doing something with that data and taking action on it.”
As well as ensuring that they have meaningful insight into agents’ performance, insurers need to provide agents with the information and capabilities they need when they visit their customers. Anytime, anywhere, any-device applications can drastically cut administration time and ensure that the latest information is immediately available to those who need to see it. “By implementing CRM-based distributor management solutions, customers have transformed their business from being very manual, paper-driven and inefficient to a digitized environment in which applications run within Outlook and dashboards deliver the insights managers need,” says Haley. “Those carriers are now much more effective at interacting with their agents.”
By connecting disparate data systems, insurers can gain the insight they need to improve the efficiency and quality of broker relationships. Those who have already implemented an insight system are illustrating how digitally-enabled distributor management can streamline operations through better knowledge transfer on customers, products and services, as well as empowering them with real-time insight into sales performance across the broker network.
“By making customer data available to brokers through familiar tools such as Outlook, and accessible on any device, insurers can provide the tools and support their agents need, enrich their relationship with customers and enable them to be more productive,” concludes Hamblin. “Ultimately, carriers are able to support the channel and make it easier for agents and brokers to sell their products – and as a result, those agents and brokers are more loyal and write more business back to the company.”
