Mark Ruquet discusses how some of these emerging leaders in the insurance agency world are finding their voice, organizing and planning for the future in his April 27 article on PROPERTYCASUALTY360.COM.  Ruquet notes in the piece that:

Young agents are already . . . starting to communicate with each other on how they can make their ideas a reality. “There’s a revolution going on in the way that we communicate, in the way we raise our agencies and basically in the way we market and brand our agencies and use our agencies for the future,” says Jason D. Cass, chairman of the National Young Agents Committee.

“We don’t want to go around the principals; we want the principals to succeed,” Cass says. “These VIPS have left us one of the best industries we can have and we want to help them move it forward. But they don’t want to give us the tools to succeed. Their tools are from the 70s and 80s and they don’t work anymore.”

There is ample evidence in the rest of our daily lives of the influence of technology and the change in our expectation about how and when we demand and consume information.  So there is little doubt that the technology changes we see elsewhere will quickly take hold in every corner of the insurance world.  The only question is:  who will embrace it when and how effectively?

Connectivity to what you need, when you need, it can empower all players in the insurance world as never before.  Over the next few weeks, my team and I will paint a new picture in this blog of what is currently possible given data and connectivity in place today, what is coming in the very near term, what industry participants can gain from it and the dangers of ignoring it.

In the meantime, please give Mr. Ruquet’s article a look and let us know your thoughts on the emerging communication “revolution”.

This week, my colleague Nick Carter had the opportunity to speak with a number of attendees of the RIMS (Risk and Insurance Management Society, Inc.) Annual Conference & Exhibition in Philadelphia.  The RIMS conference attracts a variety of risk and insurance professionals and comments like the one above were commonly heard.  I thought I would give you a glimpse into a few other discussions Nick had with key brokers and carriers, as well as his perspective on their needs:

Carrier President:  “We are always interested in generating more new business submissions but my problem is resources. I simply cannot try to get a mountain of new submissions as it will overwhelm my underwriters. I need to be able to get my message across to agencies about what we truly can write and what we cannot: Please send us what we want and send what we don’t to someone else. We spend too much time sifting through submissions to find the ones we can write.”

Nick Carter:  “This is exactly what Market Finder is designed to so. Promote what you can write and get it in front of the CSRs and marketers, not agency presidents at golf outings.”

Carrier Marketing Executive “We need to write more premium but as a niche player, we haven’t yet figured out a cost effective manner to distribute our product.  As we move away from program business to traditional broker based business, we need to figure out quickly how to reach new production sources with the infrastructure and resources that we have.”

Nick Carter:  “Market Finder will help you actively promote your brand and products. Add some Newsflashes to the mix and you have a cost efficient way to get your message across to either all or a targeted sub-set of the Exchange broker user base.”

Top 100 Agency Vice President – “We have no centralized marketing today and no way to figure out what our folks are doing, with whom they are doing it, and what the outcome is. We email pretty much everything and then rely on our folks to follow through. It’s not ideal and some definitely fall through the cracks.”

Nick Carter:  “The Exchange will allow you to take control of this critical marketing function, will help you standardize the process and will bring accountability to both internal and external relationships.”

Do these topics sound familiar to you?  Are you dealing with similar challenges?   What are the hot-button issues for your organization related to insurance submissions?

Easier to Find and Connect the Dots

Collaboration requires communication and access to shared data.  Communication is not merely sending an email nor is sharing information just uploading a file to a shared drive.  Working together on a common platform provides transparency to the work flowing through your organization and therefore new opportunities for employees to work together.

One broker I spoke with recently bemoaned the fact that three of his employees were each struggling with similar submissions to the same carrier. No one was aware what the others were doing.  Having visibility to their colleagues’ work would have enabled them to team up and leverage their collective strength rather than struggle on alone.  Extend that concept across hundreds of transactions and you get an idea of the insight into your business this transparency can provide.

Better Decisions & Stronger Team

When determining a strategy to place a unique risk or analyzing whether to write one, two heads (or more) are better than one. Inviting colleagues to view a submission in a collaborative platform is a quick way for the account owner to pull them into the decision-making loop without having to painstakingly assemble all the details or even a summary of the account.  This approach also makes it easy on the teammate being asked to weigh in – all the information is available at a glance.

The ease of asking will encourage more asking which can reduce the stigma of doing so and motivate otherwise reluctant individuals to get in the game.  A side benefit of this kind of collaboration is that more opportunities for sharing skills and experience make not only for a better outcome on a given account but a stronger sense of team.  Everyone will feel a sense of pride in contributing to each other’s success and therefore more ownership of group goals.

The lessons learned from this type of group cooperation can also be saved and leveraged for future use – another example of the power of the collaborative platform.  In the Insurance Exchange, for example, one brokerage posts post-mortem notes on risk decisions in within the forms library for quick reference as a best practice guide.  So an employee encountering the same issue on the same line of business will see this document in their normal workflow.

Perhaps it’s time to get your head (and office) in the cloud too?

Of course, in asking that question, we’re at an advantage.  The ability to see real time reports and metrics is at our fingertips with the Exchange.  And our customers have even more data since they can see the details of their own data.

Most brokers and carriers know the results of the submission process.  Carriers certainly know what they quoted and wrote, and brokers know what they bound.  But they may not know how they got there (the details of the process) or easily be able to get to basic answers on the marketing process.

For example, as a broker could you answer the following?  If so, how quickly?

• Did we remarket this account last year?
• What markets did we go to?
• What markets/underwriters/intermediaries did we engage or use?
• What was the outcome (quote/declination/no response)?
• How did we go to market (WC to one; CPP to another, etc.)
• How many submissions have we sent to a particular market?
• What is our average underwriter response time?
• Which markets do we have the most success with?
• How early are we getting to market?
• How are we tracking where status sits (does UW have the ball or the marketer?)
• Are our account managers following marketing guidelines?

Knowing these answers makes marketers, producers, CSRs and account managers more responsive to clients and gives them greater insight into their book of business.  Broker management can gain an insight into their overall operation and help their staff make smarter decisions.  Inefficiencies or bottlenecks can be quickly identified.   Clearly quantifying the full spectrum of submission volume, activities and behavior helps brokers with their carrier relationships.  Ultimately, smarter decisions are possible and more business can be retained.  And, of course, carrier members can benefit from the same data.

How many of the questions here could you answer about your business?  Perhaps it’s time to take control of the ‘madness.’

Much of our presentation and the feedback that we received focused on the inefficiencies and challenges with the commercial submission process.  This aligns with what we’re hearing from a wide array of brokers and is a big part of what the Insurance Exchange addresses for brokerages. 

Another common theme was leveraging the marketing activity data to better manage and monitor the process to help ensure agency efficiency and client stewardship is maximized.  This is particularly true as agencies streamline workflows and look for new operational models.

We’d be remiss if we neglected to mention the great XDTI Mixer at Lucky Strikes Bowling Lanes that concluded the user session – we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and the company.  A special thanks to user group president Jay Byrnes from the Byrnes agency in Connecticut for all his help.

This user is a highly successful marketer in his region. Although his success led to increased expectations and volume of work, the marketer felt he had the marketing process covered.  After all, it was just a matter of staying on top of his calls and emails.  Sure, his blood pressure rose when he had to send three emails to one carrier because the submission was too big to send in one.  Yes, he was sending sensitive information from his client by email.  Yes, it took an hour to plod through the manual process of getting a submission to all markets even after his customer interaction and market analysis was done.  And OK, all that took him away from helping other customers and pursuing new business.  But that’s just part of the pain you have to deal with to stay successful, right?

Then early last year, his organization became an early adopter of the Insurance Exchange and he was selected to help pilot the platform.  He was immediately skeptical.  “It’s another piece of software I have to learn . . .  I still have to assemble the submissions . . . my underwriters probably won’t collaborate on the platform . . . it’s not a silver bullet and I don’t have time for this.”

Some of his early experience on the platform didn’t dispel his initial concerns.  His first two submissions felt like they took longer to assemble or involved duplicate work.  He had to add the names of some of his key underwriters to his list of markets in the platform.  Several of these underwriters required calls to tell them what this new method of submission was all about and to get them to understand that it wasn’t any harder to accept a submission this way than through the current process.  He was the only person in his office using the platform and although his agency was committed to the solution, he felt a bit helpless trying to make this work.  What if it actually made his job harder or, worse yet, offended his markets?

But he kept going and a funny thing happened.  Each submission went out more quickly than the next.  Soon his average time spent on submissions dipped to less than 10 minutes.  He didn’t have to send multiple emails to one carrier.  In fact, he could submit to multiple markets at once.   He found himself not worrying about his client’s information getting into the wrong hands.  He noticed that despite some initial hesitation, his underwriters had no issues accepting submissions this way and some preferred it. He could feel himself relax when colleagues and clients asked for a complete submission status across markets and it took two mouse clicks rather than a frantic search through emails and sticky notes.  And as his volume of submissions grew, the marketer found he had a picture at his fingertips of his interaction with all his markets: how much they wrote or declined; what types of risks they really wrote; how responsive each underwriter was in the process.

This marketer now can’t conceive of going back to the chaos of his old “process.”  He’s so convinced of the power of the Insurance Exchange that he voluntarily spent a day driving a couple hours and visiting with several of his competitors to tell his story and urge them to get involved for the good of their industry.

He’s not alone.  The Insurance Exchange has not really approached its full potential but it is saving time, reducing blood pressure and building passion among its users.  Wouldn’t you like your marketers to be able to tell a similar story?

To be sure, users have kept us busy from the start with product improvement ideas and helped us define and deliver more than 200 refinements and features over the past year.  But they are also realizing very tangible, day-to-day benefits that are making them more efficient and responsive with more time to service their customers.  So I thought I would share a few of the more memorable anecdotes that brokers have related to me:

• A marketer working on a team of three, including a manager often on the road, went on vacation leaving a submission in process.  The manager ran across a good market that the marketer hadn’t used.  Since the manager was part of the submission account team, she was able to quickly add the market.  Upon return from vacation, the marketer opened the submission and had the updated status waiting for her.  The manager couldn’t get over how easy it was to do and how pleased the marketer was that her worked had been picked up so seamlessly.

Sounds simple but scenarios like this have a huge impact in terms of making it easy to manage all the work agency marketers have in process.  In many agencies, the processes and workflows vary from person to person and picking up the work of an individual may be nearly impossible to figure out in a pinch.  Another broker who has been using the Exchange only a month referred to this benefit as providing “business continuity” that allows their marketing team to back each other up saving “hours” a week and preventing any account from stalling if someone is out or otherwise busy.

• A user at one agency was admitted to the hospital unexpectedly.  In the initial days of her leave, her manager was able to pick up her work.  This user had to stay in the hospital a while longer than expected but was able to work remotely via the Exchange to keep up with her submissions.  She says it really helped keep her mind off her health issues and has been a huge convenience.
• Another broker shared the story of an underwriter who had used the Exchange at one carrier, then moved to another.  When the second company purchased another carrier, he moved to the new subsidiary.  Altogether, the underwriter  used the Insurance Exchange with three different carrier organizations.  He reached out to the broker because he said he loves using the Exchange and that he actually ”needs” the underwriting workstation home page to manage all the submissions that the broker is sending to him.  The underwriter’s new company is not a subscriber to the Insurance Exchange (he gets access to the software without cost because the broker invited him to the Exchange) but he wanted the broker’s help convincing his company to join.

These anecdotes have even more relevance in the hardening P&C market.  Brokers have to do more to sell carriers on a prospective risk.  One market manager told me:

“It’s a lot more than sending out proposals.  We have to really sell our underwriters, including a lot of phone work, all of which must be documented and kept organized with the rest of the submission.  Producers are also more involved and need to get real-time updates.  So staying organized is key and nothing does that better than the Exchange.  We’re also going out to a first group of markets, say five or six carriers, and then having to add a second or even third wave if we’re striking out on the first.  This is where we get a huge lift from the Exchange — it’s almost effortless to add the additional markets and everything is in one place. “

All of these stories speak to the power of a collaborative platform for the insurance marketing process and underscore why email does not constitute a marketing process.   If you’re still using email as your primary submission marketing tool or believe email is your marketing process, we’d love to hear how you feel about that.  Can you afford to stay with that antiquated solution?

But some look at the same trends as potentials for advantage.  Jeff Yates Executive Director of the Agents Council for Technology (ACT) which is part of the Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America is such an example and writes about what he calls “agency opportunities in a time of profound change” (see his article here).

Yates looks a several changes impacting agents, including the impact of the millennial generation entering the marketplace and boomers exiting the agency workplace:

“ In the next five years, millennials (those born in the 1980s and 90s) will become a major client segment for most agencies. These consumers grew up with technology and expect to interact with their business partners when and how they choose – not in the manner that the business partner chooses. These clients may prefer texting, mobile applications and/or using social media over traditional methods such as email.   We are witnessing this transition in communications preferences across all the generations to some extent, requiring innovative agencies to offer several communications options to their clients and to begin to maintain these preferences in their systems.”

“It is sobering to realize that over the next 10 years, as many as 50% of current agency employees and principals will have retired. How can agencies create an attractive work environment for the future generations who expect to have efficient and integrated technologies available to them? “

Yates sees a chance for agents to enhance their success by addressing these trends to “free themselves up significantly from routine processes using automation and potentially outsourcing, so they can truly focus on creating enduring relationships as trusted advisors.”  As an example, he notes that an agency could “decentralize into very local offices to be even closer to consumers, because of technology that can bind multiple offices together and allow producers and other employees to operate from anywhere” including allowing employees “to do their work from home, opening up new opportunities to hire employees who want and need a more flexible work environment.”

We agree, both in terms of general application to agencies and more specifically with the marketing process.  Too often, we see agency marketing as synonymous with email.  The means of communication certainly need to broaden as Mr. Yates suggests, both in terms of method (email, social media-type status, IM, and data transfers into other systems) as well as means of access (through the cloud, consumable on a variety of devices).  But marketing also includes the challenges of managing data, documents, and communications as part of a complex process that encompasses:

• Identifying, selecting and submitting to markets
• Tracking activity during the marketing process
• Maintaining accessible history of account activity
• Operating metrics on marketing process

We believe streamlining of the burdens of managing the marketing process will yield more time to focus on the insurance expertise that both underwriters and brokers provide by removing a lot of the processing burden.  For brokers, that means increasing the overall value of their businesses.

We encourage you to read Mr. Yates’ article and give us your impressions on these trends and opportunities.

In addition to our customers and their success with the Exchange, reassurance comes of late from one of the top three US brokers, Willis Group, who just announced the launch of Willplace, a proprietary insurance placement platform.  Among its key features is  a “matching algorithm to correlate insurer risk appetites with specific client risks and matches clients with appropriate insurers”.

Sound familiar?  If you’ve read this blog or are familiar with the Insurance Exchange it should.  Willis follows Marsh and Aon in launching their own platform that enables them to better evaluate “such factors as price competitiveness, claims service and underwriting focus, among others.”

Can you afford the same kind of platform and tools those organizations obviously feel compelled to build to stay competitive?   Likely not by yourself.   And frankly, if every broker built their own solution, each carrier would be forced to deal with something different for each of their distribution partners –much the way brokers have to deal with unique submission paths for each of their markets.  Frustration and inefficiency would be compounded.

So for those who are not Willis, Marsh or Aon, the LexisNexis Insurance Exchange offers precisely the type of insurance placement solution that the big three are building themselves but cost is spread across participants.   Approximately 70 brokers and carriers have opted to participate in the Insurance Exchange to date as paying members.  Another 300 markets participate as invitees of brokers.  These members obtain access to a cloud-based collaborative technology that represents the collective thoughts and energy of the entire group as opposed to the invention of a single entity.

That is, in fact, the whole vision behind the Insurance Exchange and why the CIAB has long searched for a partner like LexisNexis to bring it to fruition for its members and the rest of the industry:  there is a  need to come together to create a common solution for the inefficiency and redundant processing  that characterizes insurance placement for carriers and brokers.

So while we are confident that Willis could effectively use our solution, it is enlightening that we are seemingly in agreement on many of the fundamental values and nature of a solution.  But ultimately, there cannot be a plethora of solutions.  Those few with the means may try their own, but are limited to their own experience and capability.  The LexisNexis solution benefits from the collective thoughts of many brokers as well as carriers and is open and affordable to all.

One of our tag lines this year has been “Don’t get left behind”.  If Willis, Marsh and Aon think they need a placement platform, why don’t you?  Can you afford not to take a look at a solution?  Why risk getting left behind?

• Collaboration
• Data
• Security

One of the main security challenges facing the insurance industry is user authentication.    Agencies and their users are forced to manage multiple credentials across each of their carrier portals and vendor applications, including the Insurance Exchange.   Each set of credentials has a unique set of security rules for defining username/ID and password, password expiration, etc.  While these credentials can be maintained in a variety of applications, often they’re maintained via yellow sticky notes around a user’s monitor.   These sticky notes or their equivalent are not only an obvious security risk, but  represent an additional point of friction and “ease of use” challenge as users transition from one application to another and experience multiple login pages during their already busy days.

To address this challenge, a variety of industry organizations have come together to participate in ID Federation.  This group is building a Trust Framework for the insurance industry to provide “common legal and technical standards which will remove the need for IDs and passwords while increasing security and the ease of doing business with one another.”

LexisNexis has enthusiastically joined this effort as a participant, helping to define these standards.  In addition, we have moved forward with plans to implement a pilot for single-sign with a leading broker using Federated Identity in 2012 by leveraging this new Trust Framework.  This solution will enable broker users to move seamlessly between the Insurance Exchange and their internal systems such as their agency management systems.  In addition to providing user efficiency within the Insurance Exchange, Federated Identity will lessen the burden on IT by consolidating authentication management of multiple systems to a single source.

Federated Identity is the rare security requirement that actually reduces friction for the user and facilitates ease of doing business.   What carriers or vendors wouldn’t want to support this initiative?