Ed Higgins, vice president of Thousand Islands Insurance Agency in Clayton, N.Y., and vice chair at the Applied Client Network, says he believes that independent agents are missing out on the opportunity that mobile apps provide.

"Unfortunately, there is very little mobile app adoption among agents," he says. "However, mobile can be an incredibly useful tool for agents. More importantly, customers' expectations for mobile capabilities — and the ability for agents to provide service when agents are mobile — are increasing. The market paradigm has changed, and that is an alarm agents should be hearing."

Thousand Islands Agency was an early adopter of the MobileProducer, the mobile-app version of Applied System's agency management platform. For Higgins, the key benefit of the app is the ability to deliver what he calls the "Starbucks experience" for customers.

"Starbucks has mastered the process of delivering targeted information at those tiny little moments at the point of sale that customers need or that cause customers to take action," he says. "What MobileProducer does is deliver a small snippet of information at just the right time for me. Being able to identify, for instance, details of a client's physical damage coverage and servicing that client at 10 p.m. on a weekend as a result, is a great way to build a long-term relationship."

"Agents love to be across from a customer and have the information they need at their fingertips," says Hersh.

Since first introducing the app to agents in 2012, Thousand Islands has enhanced it by adding dictation capabilities via Dragon NaturallySpeaking. "That improved the workflow by replacing the need to use a small virtual keyboard of a mobile device with the ability to simply dictate activity detail into a client file," Higgins says.

Thousand Islands is looking at ways to expand the reach of the app for agency management, including in the prospecting process. "MobileProducer allows you to do a complete new-business risk survey analysis in the field by capturing data, creating a new client record, and collecting information application. We're still evaluating how useful that capability would be for us," Higgins says.

Other agency management vendors, including Vertafore and QQ Solutions, offer mobile-app versions of their platform as well. In addition, agents can choose sales and service apps for agents provided by carriers or MGAs. In August 2014, Burns & Wilcox joined the fray by introducing a sales app, available in both the iTunes App Store and Google Play, for recreational marine insurance.

"We felt it was important to give agents a mobile application that would enable them to actually transact business, rather than just provide them with promotional information. We felt that giving the agents an app they could use while on the docks or at the marina would be convenient and efficient," says Bill Gatewood, corporate vice president and director of personal insurance.

"As we continue to move forward in mobile app development, we will look for applications that help agents and brokers write business in a more efficient manner. We also have the ability to personalize the application so our partners can make it their own and add additional lines of coverage they sell in their office. We can help our agents and brokers create their own mobile app for a fraction of the cost they would normally incur," Gatewood claims.

Through the mobile app, agents and brokers can complete a recreational watercraft application and send it directly to the Burns & Wilcox marine underwriting team. Agents can request an application be emailed directly to them, submit a question regarding a watercraft or coverage, upload photos of a boat, and access marine-related information and FAQs.

With the app new to the market and the boating season in hiatus in many areas of the U.S., usage of the app by retail agents has been slow by design. "We launched the mobile app with little fanfare since the boating season was nearly over and we wanted to be sure it worked as expected. Our plan is to push it hard in February as the season begins," says Gatewood.

Burns & Wilcox is developing a second mobile app that will allow Canadian retail brokers to submit U.S. risks to Burns & Wilcox's cross border team. "We think that also provides some convenience to retail brokers — we will see," Gatewood says.

Dual-Purpose

Also available for agents are dual-purpose apps, designed for agencies to offer to customers as a self-service tool but which can also be used for agency productivity and agent-delivered customer service. One offering on both the Apple and Android marketplaces is the aptly named Insurance Agent from goinsuranceagent.com.

"Insurance Agent is an interesting take on the consumer-facing mobile app," Hersh says. "It's like a carrier app from the customer's point of view, but it's offered by the agency so it allows the agency to both build customer relationships and capture information more easily from clients."

"If the agent is going to stay a critical part of the triangle between carriers, consumers, and the agency, the app [offered to consumers] needs to keep agency in the loop. When you go carrier to customer, as carriers are going, those apps aren't helping the agency because they cut the agency out or fragments the industry," says goinsuranceagent.com's Kiki Johnson.

Paradiso Insurance, headquartered in Stafford Springs, Conn., introduced an agency-branded version of the Insurance Agent app to customers in October 2014. The app allows customers to perform a number of common servicing functions, including paying a bill, calling or e-mailing the agent without having to look up a number or address, storing insurance cards, vehicle registration and other information, and reporting claims.

"We've had a great success rate with reporting claims. People like it," says agency owner Chris Paradiso. The app syncs with the agency's QQ Solutions management system to deliver insurance cards and other documents in near real-time.

"Car-buying is a key touch point with customers," Paradiso says. "If you call me and you want an insurance card because you bought a new car, as soon as we hang up that insurance card is sitting inside your app on your phone. That's a powerful capability."

From an agency management perspective, the app delivers Paradiso Insurance several key benefits. First is communication. "We use the app for sending texting-type messages to individual consumers," Paradiso says. "Texting is more effective than an e-mail because people pay attention to it more — it's immediate."

The agency also provides safety-related information to customers via the app, including videos and vehicle logs. It also uses the app for push notifications; for instance, when a winter storm approaches, the agency uses the app to advise customers to clear their roof of snow.

By controlling the app, the agency also is able to analyze customer activity and use the results in relationship building. "The downside of carrier apps is that they don't provide any real tracking for agency owners. If you can't see who is downloading the app and what they're using it for, what good is that? It's like having a website without analytics," says Paradiso.

Insurance Agent provides a dashboard that delivers current information and analytics. "Having information stored and synced on the dashboard allows agents to use that information for upselling and cross-selling opportunity, compared to carrier apps," Johnson says.

The Case for Mobile

Other agents, including Page, are still unconvinced that many consumers need or want apps from their agent. "With respect to consumer-facing mobile apps, I've looked at the few offerings and I'm thoroughly unimpressed," he says. "For starters, very few people will want an insurance app. If given the choice to download Candy Crush or a mobile insurance agency app — well, enough said."

However, Johnson believes that offering customers an app is becoming a competitive necessity in particular for independent agents.

"The industry fell behind with creating websites, but could get away with it because the competition wasn't there. Today, the competition is there [for mobile]. The direct writers are there who can build mobile capabilities to do everything that needs to be done, and they've got the money on the mobile side to build apps that are equivalent to what banking or commerce is doing, or anybody else," Johnson says.

"The insurance industry doesn't have the luxury of saying, 'We'll wait on this one and see how it goes, because mobile isn't going away," she adds. "It will be more and more pervasive."

Paradiso Insurance has achieved a 40 percent mobile-app penetration among customers, but has had to work hard to achieve that level.

"We send out cards and mailers, we use LinkedIn, Twitter, Vine, we do e-mails to build awareness. We try to hit them from every direction," Paradiso says.

Higgins believes that agents will increase their use of mobile apps for agency management in the months ahead.

"There is not currently the kind of aggressive, visible pressure for agents to use mobile apps, but that is changing," he says. "Agents need to take a broader view and recognize that the world is going mobile. Our customers have the capacity to have services that serve them at their moment of need, and they expect the same from us."

"It's a bit of a calm before the storm," Hersh says. "There might not be a reason now where you must have an app for your agents, but that will change. The tipping point is close."