And while some insurers are enabling their Web portals to allow direct consumer purchasing, todays smartest carriers understand they will achieve the highest return on investment with Internet technology that makes their agents lives easier.

By leveraging todays Web technology to streamline the workflow process for their agents, carriers can sharpen their competitive advantage.

The pace of technological advancement in the p-c industry has been slow. In the old days, carriers and agents communicated through a cumbersome system of phones, faxes, rating manuals and paper stacks.

Not long ago, most agents were relegated to a frustrating and tedious “pong” match between multiple “green screen” carrier terminals, often waiting days for quote approvals and weeks to get a new policy issued.

The increasingly widespread use of e-mail in the mid-1990s was the first major step toward workflow automation that the Internet brought to the carrier-agent relationship. Today, a majority of carriers have built Web sites, allowing agents to submit online applications.

But most carriers still respond with an antiquated back-end process in which carrier employees manually type information into their legacy systems much like receiving a fax. Thus, the waiting period for rate approvals and policy issuance for many agents can still stretch into the days and weeks.

Consider the following:

An agent has a prospect sitting in his office and is eyeing two carriers with basically the same reputation for cost and quality. The agent can submit an online application to the first carrier, but has to wait a day or longer to obtain a quote and get the policy issued. The second carrier has a Web portal that is fully integrated with its back-end legacy system, allowing real-time quotes from the carrier and instantaneous policy issuance.

Which carrier do you think the agent will recommend?

A small but quickly growing set of forward-thinking carriers have invested in this “straight-through processing” technology, made possible by the back-end integration of their legacy systems to their Web portals. As a result, agents are able to enjoy real-time policy issuance, inquiry response, policy changes, reinstatements, cancellations and other transactions over the Internet.

The download from the carrier system to the agency management system also eliminates the need for double entry of policy information.

Integrated carrier Web sites dramatically improve agents historical workflow problems while simultaneously achieving tremendous cost savings and efficiencies for the carriers. Agents can easily and efficiently perform data entry and other tasks that once had to be done by the carriers.

No longer do carriers have to manually key in and scan the information that comes in from agentsbusiness literally comes in and out the door without having to touch anything.

The next frontier of Web-enablement technology is the hotly debated quest for SEMCI (single-entry, multiple-carrier interface). This Holy Grail of carrier-agent connectivity would allow agents to enter the information into their own in-house agency management systems and receive multiple quotes back from several different carriers, eliminating the need of entering the data redundantly into several proprietary carrier Web sites.

This technology would require the widespread implementation of the ACORD XML standards to create a single, ubiquitous interface with agency management systems, a process that is only in its nascent stages.

Meanwhile, insurers who arent using the Web to build real-time pathways to agents with available technology are putting themselves in a highly disadvantageous competitive position.

Overall, todays smartest carriers realize that their agents are and will continue to be vitally important revenue generators. Their interactions with customers can make or break the consumer perception of an insurance company, playing a critical role in the success or failure of customer retention efforts.

By providing agents with Web-enablement technology that automates the entire lifecycle of an insurance policy, carriers can achieve tremendous savings and score higher marks in customer retention.

Gordon Gaar is chief technology officer for INSpire Insurance Solutions, based in Fort Worth, Texas. He can be contacted at [email protected].

Reproduced from National Underwriter Property & Casualty/Risk & Benefits Management Edition, July 1, 2002. Copyright 2002 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.