At first glance, an insurer’s distributor force and a middle-school classroom might not seem to have much in common. But one of the things I learned when I taught middle-school students (albeit many years ago) was that a group of seemingly homogenous people actually had a remarkably wide range of educational needs. I had to design a lesson plan to accommodate the entire spectrum of those needs and wisely choose how to allocate limited resources.
Likewise, it can be challenging for carriers to deploy technology to meet the needs and wants of distributors because of time and budget constraints as well as the wide range of technology—and technological sophistication—agents have.
“There are some agents who have made substantial investments in their technology, and others who haven’t,” says Jeff Kamrowski, senior vice president of business services at Selective.
“Carriers are dealing with very different user groups” within their distributor force, observes Steven Leigh, principal analyst in Gartner’s insurance industry advisory service. “The older user group still is generating lots of business and is comfortable doing business the ‘old way.’ But younger agents have a whole new set of technology demands. Carriers also have built their technology for their ‘big hitters,’ and that doesn’t necessarily include a lot of the younger generation of agents.”
NEEDS ASSESSMENT
The first step in meeting agents’ demands is listening to what they’re asking for. Carriers haven’t always been good at doing that, but fortunately for distributors, insurers’ attitudes have begun to change. “They’re hearing some of it,” says Kimberly Harris-Ferrante, research vice president at Gartner.
“In the past, we didn’t take a lot of time worrying about what our agents thought or how they wanted to interact from a technology standpoint, which certainly wasn’t a unique position in the industry,” says Brady Polansky, agency operations director at Westfield Insurance. “We were focused on our internal processes and thought the franchise value of our company was enough to make them do what we thought was best.”
Polansky came to Westfield with 15 years of experience on the agency side of the business. The last four years, he says, have seen a dramatic change in the way Westfield assesses and addresses agents’ needs.
“The first thing we did was put together an agency automation feedback group, comprised of about 15 people from all different departments within the company,” he explains. The next step was making a contact database available to all staff so that all agent suggestions could be captured and reviewed by the automation group. Finally, the feedback group began running a monthly query against other databases looking for suggestions that might have been captured in other systems, such as those used by the call center.