Designing A Highly Productive Agency Management System

There’s a lot to share here so let’s start with this summary video to give you an idea of what it takes to “Design A Highly Productive Agency Management System In This Workflow Driven Industry”. Watch it now …

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What Are The Components Of A Highly Productive System?

If you’re going to create a highly productive system you must have an intimate knowledge and understanding of:

  • The different functions in an agency,
  • Workflows,
  • Productivity strategies and
  • A clear, extensive understanding of agency automation.

As insurance automation consultants who have worked with over a thousand CSR’s and have worked with numerous agency management systems, from our own frustrations of the systems on the market and how they hindered an agencies productivity along with our extensive background in agency automation we knew what we needed to create before a single line of code was written. This included:

It Needed To Be Workflow Driven Since, After All, This Is A Workflow Driven Industry.

First and foremost it must be workflow driven because this is one of the most difficult and time consuming jobs of the CSR… processing tasks like endorsement, renewals, etc. and then trying to stay on top of them.

Let me ask you a question. How do you train your new CSR’s to process these tasks? And, how long does it take before they’re proficient at it?

A lot of agencies will create a workflow manual because of the many variations that could be involved in a task such as:

  • The LOB … how you process a renewal for a personal auto policy will be different than how you process a renewal for a commercial auto policy.
  • The Carrier … it’s not uncommon for a carrier to request additional information or have different steps in the task.
  • The Task … the steps, what you submit, what you need to follow up on is different from a renewal to an endorsement to a claim, etc.

How we’ve created a workflow driven system is top secret until we start demo’ing the system. That shouldn’t surprise you any considering this is the first workflow driven system to hit the market place!

Let me just say this about this powerful evolutionary feature … It will take you less than 30 seconds to teach your CSR’s how to process a task, and your CSR’s will master workflows in a matter of minutes versus months with a non-workflow driven system.

You’re going to truly love this feature!

Here’s what else is needed if you’re going to create a highly productive system…

The System Must Be Single-Entry!

Doing double/triple entry is one of the biggest thief’s of your time. This right here is also one of the top attributes of CP Manager that our users really appreciate.

We could spend an hour just demo’ing all of the ways we created a very single-entry system. To get the level of single-entry we have in CP Manager you’d have to go to Epic or 360. CP Manager is far more single-entry than the lower priced systems.

How Thoroughly & Tightly You Integrate Features Into The System!

All systems have Notes, Follow Ups, offer the ability to send Emails and create letters, to name a few of the inherent standard feature you’d find in any agency management system.

It’s how thoroughly and tightly integrated they are into the system that makes all of the difference.

We thoroughly integrated the core service tools into CP Manager. Let’s take a look at a Client Note… (click to enlarge)

  1. The Primary Contact automatically defaults in the Talked To field. Just the fact that we have a “Talked To” field to keep track of who you talked to or corresponded with is an advancement in Notes.
    1. You can change who you talked to by selecting another client contact.
    2. When you select a client contact the note is also tied to their contact record. You can see all notes for a specific contact.
  2. You can categorize your Notes. This allows you to filter notes by this field to find all notes associated to the same category.
  3. Action. What was the action associated to this note. Did you talk to them, was it from emails?
  4. Tie the Note to a policy. You can filter notes by the policy, or if you’re on a policy you can click Notes to see all of the notes for that policy.
  5. You can even tie it to a specific policy section. This is handy when the note is specific to a section, not a policy as a whole.
  6. If you’re working with the carrier on this specific issue you can also link (tie) this note to the Carrier for the policy. With an advanced Carrier Hub to maintain better communication with your carriers this offers a way of linking notes both on the Insured record and on the carrier.

This is just the beginning to what we’ve done with Notes and the other Service Tools.

You can create a Note from a Master Certificate. When you pull up that note in the Form field there will be a link to that Master Certificate.

It’s the same with creating a Note from an Endorsement except that from the Endorsement it pulls in the Endorsement Summary into the Note Body. Why? Because that’s what you’d do… enter a summary of the Endorsement in the note, right?

These are just a few examples. You should see what we did with Follow Ups… impressive!

To Increase Your Productivity And Create A More Thorough Integration We Built Correspondence Into CP Manager…

This is also why we built the correspondence –Emails, Faxes and Letters– into CP Manager. Correspondence is thoroughly integrated into CP Manager.

  • No more drag and drop emails
  • Email attachments are a click away from adding them as an attachment to the clients or carriers record.
  • One click to email an Invoice to a client
  • Broadcast emailing or faxing certificates to all of the cert holders is a breeze.
  • You can create letter mail-merge templates. You can also create a mail-merge email and fax template.

The advantages go on and on. The simple fact is, you can do so much more when you build it into the system versus integrating with a 3rd party program.

Making Commonly Accessed Information Quickly Accessible. We Put It All On One Window…

If you break-down (dissect) the job of the CSR you will find there are consistent things the CSR does just about every day. Things like:

  • Follow Ups
  • Open Endorsements to make sure they’re getting processed
  • Emails, Faxes and Letters saved as a draft to finish later
  • Policies Past Expiration Date to find out what happened to the policy and why it wasn’t renewed.
  • Policies coming up for renewal

These are just a few things. What’s been frustrating is anybody who understands the job of the CSR knows all of this.

CP Manager is the first system to actually create a solution which puts all of this on one page so these important tasks the CSR needs to stay on top of no longer slips through the CSRs fingers. It’s called the My Activities Dashboard Hub.

This one page has made a huge difference in how much more efficient and productive the CSR can be.

It’s Paying Attention To The Details.

So often programmers overlook the small things that can make a big difference. As I can attest to first hand, programmers are not users and their level of computer savviness is way beyond that of the normal CSR. What comes natural to them in their computer-ease world can be very foreign and complex to the normal CSR.

Even though it took programming longer, we stood our ground of the importance of “easy to use”. I’m sure you’ll agree it was worth it.

Let’s take a look at a few of the things we’ve done to make the system easier to use.

Our Buttons Have Words For A Reason

In the web based environment a standard practice is to use image icons as buttons like to add a new record, to edit a record and many other functions. The problem with images alone and no words with them to tell the user what the image button does is it forces the user to have to hover over the image until the help bubble opens up to see what that button is. This takes time and decreases a users productivity.

Programmers love image only buttons. Users don’t because they hinder their productivity. This is why we made absolutely sure that there were words with all of our image buttons so you know exactly what the button does without having to hover over it!  Here’s a sample of what our buttons look like (from Client Record)…

IconsClientHub

We Hardly Have Any Images In CP Manager.

Next, we greatly minimized the number of actual images in our system including with buttons. Why?

Because images take up bandwidth and decrease the load speed of the window, and we were adamant on having a fast system!

Plus, we also wanted a system which would run very well on smart phones and tablets.

This also means if you purchase the hosted version and have a slower internet speed the system will still run very well (see “The CP Manager is FAST” article where I show you running the system with an internet connection of 0.63 mbps download and 0.40 mbps upload).

We Have Lots of Lookup Tables To Speed Up Data Entry And Maintain Integrity Of The Information In Those Fields

Next is lookup tables. Mr Chesnut loves lookup tables because they maintain data integrity in the system so everyone’s putting in the same values which will play an important role when running reports and filtering on fields. There are quite a few lookup tables in the system.

To further increase your speed at entering data Mr Chesnut had programming tie fields many of the fields in CP Manager to a lookup table table. The advantages are many, including greatly speeding up data-entry as you can see in the following image.

Take the first field, the category field. This note is about Renewals so when you start typing in renewal, r – e – n, the system auto-filled Renewal at which time you can just tab out of the field to the Action field where you can type in, t – a for Talked which is auto-filled so you can tab out of this field to the Talked To field.

The Talked To field is tied to the Carrier Contacts table. Let’s say you talked to John Peterson so you type in, j-o-h, and the system auto-filled the contact you talked to so you can tab out of this field. Watch the animated GIF image to see how it works when adding a note…

Adding A Note

This note could’ve also been tied to a policy and a section of a policy. More about this on another page.

You don’t need to take your hands off the keyboard until you click into the note body after entering the summary.

We have lookup tables that auto-fill throughout the whole system to speed up your data-entry. Once you’ve experienced this you’ll never want to go back to needing to type out the full field value, or be forced to grab the mouse to click on the down arrow to the right of the field to open up the lookup table values, and then scroll down the list to find what you’re looking for, all of which increases your time to add a record.

What I’ve shared with you is just a small sampling of what we’ve done in the system to increase your productivity.

After 30 Years You Would’ve Thought There’d Already Be A Workflow Driven System

President Bradley Chesnut is constantly shaking his head in disbelief that it’s taken over 30 years for there to finally be a workflow driven system introduced to this workflow driven industry. He’ll tell all of us that a workflow driven system would’ve unquestionably made his job a whole lot easier when helping agencies increase their productivity over the years.

He also points out that a workflow driven system would easily decrease the amount of training agencies would need and the need to hire high-end 3rd party insurance automation consultants. A workflow system will make a significant difference in the overall costs to the agency for their automation and the profitability of an agency.

With all of the ways an agency will benefit, it’s shocking that the CP Manager will be the first workflow driven system in the market.

Along with his discussions about workflows and workflow driven systems, he’s also consistently discussing how much he loves helping agencies, how committed he is to agencies and how someone had to come along and…

  • Put the agency at the highest priority by providing them with the right automation that’s priced fairly so every agency can afford it,
  • Provide the right kind of training at the vendor level so agencies aren’t forced to go to high priced 3rd party insurance automation consultants to maximize the productivity and efficiency of their staff, and
  • The importance of really listen to users and their needs since this is their system they use to run their business, that they need to be involved in the direction of the product, have a say in the priority of upcoming features along with the design of the upcoming features and how users should be able to be as involved in the company and product as they want to be.

He’s unquestionably a huge advocate and supporter of the independent agency. These are just a few things he’s constantly preaching to his staff which are the people who will be serving you.

Like I said, Mr Chesnut is a strong advocate of agencies across the country. You’ll really appreciate everything Mr Chesnut is doing for you. Like he constantly says to agencies he talks with,

“We’re on YOUR side!”

 

PO Box 13405
Spokane Valley, WA 99213
Phone: 208-242-4321
Fax: 509-368-7325

info@AgencyATeam.com
www.AgencyAutomationTeam.com

Isn’t it time you got your time back?
Now you can with CP Manager!

 

Schedule your Walk-Through Now and See For Yourself What a Highly Productive System Can Do For Your Agency!