“The insurance industry has made worthy strides over the last few years instandardizing workflows by implementing real time through their agency management system and/or comparative rater,” says Cal Durland, director of member relations at ACORD, a Real Time/Download Campaign sponsor. “This has saved agents and brokers time and money, especially when compared with going from carrier portal to carrier portal.”

According to the survey, agents want to use Real Time even more, but the failure of some carriers to offer the functionality leads to multiple workflows, which makes them less competitive, according to Durland.

“To take it to the next level, agents say they want more of their preferred carriers to work with them in real time and to offer the full range of real-time transactions across the major lines of business. It's becoming a differentiator when agents choose where to place business,” says Durland.

The second-highest priority agents and brokers identified in the survey was “faster response time,” cited as a “5″ by 52 percent of respondents and placed in the top-three priorities by 44 percent of agents surveyed.

“Agents see significant time-saving benefits from those carriers that implement “best practice” real-time workflows,” says Jeff Yates, executive director of Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers ofAmerica's Agents Council for Technology (ACT), another campaign sponsor.

“When carriers and vendors implement 'best-practice' real-time workflows, agents can serve their clients faster,” says Yates. “Efficient real-time implementations also increase agent usage of the functionality, helping carriers achieve their goals of enhanced ease of doing business and reducing the demand on their own call centers, which represents a significant insurance company expense.”

Guide for Carriers, Vendors

To help insurance companies and vendors better understand how to implement real time and the best practice real-time workflows that agents seek, the campaign brought together industry volunteers to identify and document current carrier best practices, as well as how agents would like to see Real Time evolve in the future.

“Agents and brokers who served on the Agency Real-Time Experience Work Group looked at what is working on the front lines,” said work group chair Cyndy Smith, vice president at Haylor, Freyer, Coon, and past co-chair of the campaign. “Then we worked with carriers and vendors to create a report that shows how these successful practices could be more broadly implemented.”

Teresa Addy, business technology analyst at campaign sponsor EMC Insurance Companies, who helped create the report, added: “Our goal was to show carriers that are new to Real Time—and those that are expanding their offerings—the best way to go. By eliminating dependence on proprietary Websites and offering a consistent agency workflow, carriers can help build a more efficient agency system, drive increased business, and deliver enhanced service to agents and insureds.”

The recently published guide, titled Agency Real-Time Best Practice Workflows and Implementation Strategies: Guidance for Carriers & Vendors,” reviews key issues and shares information for carriers that wish to offer the tools agents and brokers require to compete with direct writers. It is available online at http://bit.ly/tjtNBh. Other resources are available at the campaign website, www.getrealtime.org.

Additional Priorities

Other suggested improvements and the percentage of survey participants who rated each one's priority as a “5″ include:

• Easier password management, 41 percent
• Commercial lines real-time comparative rating, 41 percent
• Reduction of real-time quote requests that error out, 44 percent

Agents and brokers placed high value on real-time improvements that empowered them to handle their business processes more quickly, such as “ability to receive a quote back into the agency management system rather than just bridging to carrier Website to complete quote,” rated a “5″ by 42 percent of agents. Forty-three percent gave a “5″ to “improved inquiry functionality that allows agent to link back to complete transaction for client (such as from billing inquiry to make a payment, etc.).”

Thirty-nine percent of those responding rated “improved personal lines endorsement processing” a “5″ priority and 34 percent identified “improved commercial lines endorsement processing” as a “5.”

Open-ended survey responses showed strong consensus around specific improvements agents wanted on endorsement processing. Many mentioned linking to the specific carrier page where they wanted to make a change, securing an immediate acknowledgment of the change, and the ability to transfer amended data from the agency management system directly to the carrier's system and back. Other suggestions addressed getting tostandardized formats for ease of use and training, and getting immediate and accurate pricing.

Agents continue to be primarily focused on continuing to broaden and improve real-time transactions between the agency and the carrier, putting less emphasis at the current time on the “extension of real-time service capability to clients through agency website portal.” Only 26 percent of the agents rated this client-oriented real-time functionality a “5″ and just 10 percent placed it in their top-three priorities.

The survey also offered agents and brokers one last opportunity to mention any other priorities they had for improvement to real-time tools. In addition to re-emphasizing other topics like carrier participation, speed and password management, many respondents listed expanded “claims download” as extremely important to their businesses.