Empowering Your Agent
Insurance Networking News, May 1, 2009
Property/casualty firms are offering agent portals with rich functionality to reduce costs and appeal to agents' pressing needs.
The current economic climate is causing insurers to rethink their agent portals. The onus is on insurers to replace static, information-only sites with transactional sites where agents can conduct business. The secret sauce? Configuration-based Web systems flexible enough to align insurers' business requirements with agents' new business input.
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Nevada general Insurance Co., which began using Insuresoft's policy rating engine, Diamond, in 2004, needed an easily deployable, easily maintainable portal for its agents that could cut costs and boost efficiencies. So in the spring of 2008, the automobile insurance provider, which solely has captive agents, launched a customizable agent portal using Diamond as its back-end rating engine. Since then, its agents have been singing praises about the portal's speed and ease-of-use, while the carrier has seen a reduction of about 85% in the time it takes for underwriting to issue a policy, says William Walo, VP of information systems for the Las Vegas, Nev.-based carrier.
Insuresoft's agency portal "drops the policy directly into the policy management system and it waits there for issuance," explains Walo. "So all that our underwriting crew has to do is verify that all the documents were signed correctly, that we have the correct MVRs, that everything is as it should be, and then they just rate and issue the policy." For its agencies in Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona, Nevada General plans to continue adding functionality to its portal, including processing endorsements and automating calls to pull driving records. The firm also is building a consumer portal-based on its agent portal - that will enable potential customers to rate and issue a policy online. "We are a small market player and a small company, but we are going to be able to provide to the customers at large on the Internet the same basic ability that you can see happening from a lot of the larger, major players," says Walo.
SURGING ADOPTION
Nevada General is hardly unique in its portal play. Most property/casualty firms now have agent portals, and have moved beyond static Web pages (that, for instance, featured downloadable PDF forms) to offer fully interactive sites that help agents with most of their interactions with the carrier. Carriers now frequently have agent portals that allow for new business submission, renewal negotiation, endorsement processing, cancellation processing, direct bill inquiry, real-time rating bridge and application submission. Web sites also enable agents to access basic information about the carrier and the types of products offered, as well as the ability to manage their personal profile so they can view their commissions, reports and other data.
"The insurance industry has come leaps and bounds in the last few years in terms of what kind of portals they are making available to their agents and to their customers," says Jeff Goldberg, senior analyst in the insurance practice of Celent, a research and consulting firm based in Boston, Mass. "They have grown from very static information-only sites to become transactional sites where you can do business, and actually do business easier."
Vendors are thus tackling more sophisticated tasks such as "how we apply specific rules so that we get more of the upfront underwriting out of the way so that an agent has a more solid quote, or is able to bind coverage upfront," says Terry Brown, VP of implementation services of University Park, Ill.-based Insuresoft.
HIGHLY-SOUGHT FEATURES
Carriers are distinguishing their sites in part by creating a design that makes for a user-friendly experience, and by providing rich functionality. Insurers that have launched multifunctional portals, such as Accident Fund Insurance Co. of America, Lansing, Mich., have frequently found that agents have particularly embraced the real-time rating bridges. While they are in their agency management system, Accident Fund's agents can click a "transact now" or blue butterfly button, triggering the data in their core application to flood into Accident Fund's Agency Link system, a product from Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC), Falls Church, Va. After filling out several fields to obtain a quote with Accident Fund, an agent has successfully bridged the data.
Teresa Lambie
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