Lobby Within the Industry for Real (Time) Change

I have represented independent agents and brokers in the halls of Congress for the past 20 years and have seen first hand our members’ grassroots power on legislative issues. A few well-placed agents can greatly influence the content or fate of a particular bill. We can have the same impact on business issues by focusing our grassroots strength in this arena as well.

The current inefficiencies in the policy rating process is an issue crying out for vigorous advocacy by the Big “I” and its 300,000 agents, brokers and employees. Agency frustration with having to spend one to two hours to rate a personal lines policy is boiling over. Today, agents typically must go to multiple carrier Web sites and enter the same information several times to determine which carrier offers his or her customer the best combination of price, coverage and service.

Fortunately, there is a much more efficient alternative that several carriers and vendors have begun to roll out: Real-time multiple company rating. This technology enables an agent or broker to request and receive rates from multiple carriers simultaneously working through the agency management system or comparative rater of their choice. This improved agency workflow eliminates the separate logons, passwords, multiple data entry and additional employee training required when rating policies using carrier Web sites.

Our challenge now is to take real-time multiple rating from its current introductory stage and make it the industry’s predominant workflow. We can make this happen if our grassroots agents take up the gauntlet by both lobbying for it and implementing it. We need to shape how we will do business in the future and not just sit passively by and let companies and vendors shape our future for us.

I urge you to:
• Advise your companies at every opportunity that real-time multiple company rating is very important to you and that the current carrier Web site approach to rating is unacceptable as a long-term strategy. Bring this issue up at your company marketing meetings and in your company advisory council meetings. Thank carrier CEOs when they make the necessary investments to provide you with this improved technology and point out the positive impact it is having on your sales process.
• Press your vendor to offer this technology and to make it as easy and cost effective as possible for the carriers to implement it.
• Implement this, as well as other real-time technologies, as soon as particular companies make them available to you, even if it means having to live with multiple workflows for a period of time. Companies and vendors closely monitor the number of agencies implementing real-time before deciding whether to invest further in the technology themselves.
• Visit the Agents Council for Technology Web site at www.independentagent.com/act for specific talking points and other information to use in advocating this issue to carriers and vendors. Visit www.acttech.org for carrier- and vendor-specific information on what types of real-time transactions they have available for their agencies.

While real-time multiple company rating is the No. 1 workflow improvement we are pressing for today, the Big “I” is actively pursuing other initiatives to make your business processes more efficient and effective. We established ACT in 1999 to keep a continuing focus on how we can use technology more effectively to improve all aspects of our agencies, including making electronic interfaces with companies more efficient.

ACT encourages agents to focus on these additional areas of business improvement:
• Implement real-time billing and claims inquiry, electronic policy view, loss runs and endorsements to save processing time and to free up staff for higher-value service and sales activities.
• Take another look at commercial lines download for your agency in order to achieve the same benefits you derive from personal lines download every day. The industry has worked very hard in the past year to improve the quality of these downloads.
• Plan for the occurrence of disasters, whether from natural or man-made causes, because they can impact any agency and threaten the continued viability of your business.
• Implement a security plan for your agency to keep your systems running and to fulfill your legal obligations to safeguard the private information of your customers.

ACT has developed business tools to assist agencies in each of these areas, as well as in several others, that are available on the ACT Web site as a member benefit. You can also contact Jeff Yates, ACT’s executive director, for more information at jeff.yates@iiaba.net.

Bob Rusbuldt (bob.rusbuldt@iiaba.net) is CEO of the Big “I.”