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Crucial Customer Service Flows from Agent Portals
May 2007Customer satisfaction can make or break any business. When it comes to insurance, an agent's ability to provide top-notch customer service can have long-term consequences for revenue and can make or break a carrier's image in the marketplace. That may be why so many carriers provide agents with portals that create a win-win situation.
"Unknown [or objects of curiosity] a mere seven years ago, agent and policyholder portals are now required channels and are nearly ubiquitous at insurers," says "The Technology Foundations of Advantage for Insurers," a report from Boston-based Celent LLC.
What's more, 52% of property/casualty insurers view agent portals as key differentiators, the Celent report says. The carriers cite faster cycle time for new business and reduced re-keying errors as advantages and they also note that strong portals improve visibility and reputation among agents and policyholders.
Meanwhile, life/health companies, whose policyholders go online to manage investments or track claims payments, see portals as differentiators.
Carriers benefit when they work hard to provide the capabilities agents want, observers say.
"Ease of doing business for our agency partners is critical," says Brad Hauser, vice president and CTO of Columbus, Ohio-based American Commerce Insurance Co. (ACIC), which sells through AAA and independent agents.
"We realize that we owe our distribution partners the ability to do business with us easily," says Hauser. "They make a commitment to us to sell our product; we've got to make a commitment to them that we're among the best and easiest to do business with."
Agents want 24/7, "always on" systems so they can work when they want to, Celent research shows. They also want Web-enabled systems, accessible without proprietary hardware and software, says Celent's "Designed for Success: The Must-Have Attributes of Producer Tools."
Ohio National Financial Services, Cincinnati, another insurer devoted to the wants and needs of agents, conducted a focus group before rolling out the fifth version of its agent portal, On-Net, which has more than 10,000 users. The carrier gathered agents, general agents, regional vice presidents and office staff-anyone who might use the Web site-as an advisory panel, says Chris Spanier, director of enterprise and Internet communications at Ohio National.
"With each successive iteration as we got closer and closer to beta and then at launch we widened that group," which even included one of Ohio National's biggest critics, says Spanier. "I remember telling our developers we're going to involve Person X, and they were hesitant. [The critic] was always quick to share ideas on what else we could be doing. But we turned someone who was highly critical of our site into one of its biggest advocates."
Agents often want interactivity on Web sites, says Doug Allen, vice president of IT for Columbus, Ohio-based State Auto.
"When we first started doing agency interface in the late 1990s, a lot of data uploads were done through a batch process, so the agents would start something on their system using some of our rating software," says Allen.
They would eventually upload that, and we would pick that up every night," says Allen. "But now, with portals, we're seeing a lot more interactivity with that agency management system, so they may want to start the process of collecting their customer information in their agency management system but then bridge that data into a portal."
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