This is part of the list supported by AgentSync.
We talk a lot on this blog about the problem of data silos, the pain of manual data entry (and re-entry), and how frustrating it is for developers, employees, and businesses to face these challenges.
If our previous arguments have not been satisfactory, I would like to share with you a matter that may appear to have nothing to do with insurance or your insurance business. Just laugh at me for a minute, and I think you’ll understand how it all works.
About two years ago, I moved house. Nothing fancy, but I’ve moved a few times in my life and it’s never been this bad. It wasn’t that a moving car ran into our electricity and knocked out the internet for a week. Also, the people who lived next door to us were not intruders and they used to report all their complaints about lawn maintenance to the government officials.
It was a letter. Change of address forms to be exact.
The problem is twofold:
First, we moved to a rural area where the Postal Service does not deliver mail to a home address. If something doesn’t have our PO Box number, forget about it. Because the post office doesn’t have a quick, easy, and reliable way to link our address to our mailbox number, employees simply refuse to return our mail to our mailbox.
This means that anything sent to the home is returned to the sender as non-returnable. If you can imagine how many important items we don’t receive because someone had our address and not a PO Box, multiply that by 100 and you’ll be close.
Second, even though we filled out address change forms (and yes, including the PO Box number) with everyone from the Postal Service, to the IRS, to the state Department of Revenue, to the Department of Motor Vehicles, to the county treasurer, to the county. Tax office, etc., mail is still sent to our old address – or sometimes it is sent to our new address but without a box number, meaning it cannot be sent again.
The last time I got a piece of mail delivered to me by the kind new landlords of my first home, I called the government agency to get the address corrected (again). I was at the end of my wits with the poor lady on the phone who had to listen to me rant all the time, and all the places, I already filled my new address on the last 18 months.
“How is it possible that you still have the wrong address?” I asked to know.
“I’m sorry. It’s just, the systems are not connected.”
At this point I realized that there was a big gap between what I expected as a consumer and the technology of every government agency that I had to interact with as a citizen.
Are you starting to see the parallels between my tale of woe and what your employees, producers, or insurance distributors may be going through? For the sake of clarity, let’s be clear:
Manual action: It’s likely that the people in charge of developer license compliance at your organization have a crazy workload. Like communicating between paper documents, spreadsheets, and websites. It is possible that they have to check things regularly because there is no real way to immediately confirm the manufacturer’s license.
All of this means that it is possible, like the workers at my post office, that they simply stop doing some manual work, or leave things running smoothly, or don’t have time to work. Although everyone is taking the time to diligently use these manual methods, they are often inaccurate, so you may end up with less than ideal accuracy. Like the time someone changed my PO Box numbers and gave someone a box of live maggots to control the fly population on my farm.
Multiple, different systems: If you are an insurance agent that contracts with different agencies (or intermediaries), or an insurance agency or MGA/MGU that contracts with many different producers, it is certain that someone is on your way to distribute insurance. it is entering the same items in multiple places. In fact, they are probably entering the same thing in more than two or three places. Not only is this frustrating for everyone involved, but it can lead to errors and oversights that could land your organization in hot water.
There is no single truth: Imagine the frustration of a licensed developer who is trying to fix or fix something. Maybe it’s a new non-citizen license, or they just passed the license test for a new line of jurisdiction. How many different places do they have to write this story? Depending on the situation, they can go to your company’s Human Resource Information System (HRIS), your organization’s management system (AMS), your customer relationship management (CRM), your motivational management (ICM), their government. the insurance department, and other regulatory agencies – just to name a few! And, since we don’t know what we don’t know, they will continue to play whack-a-mole with misinformation as long as it takes any place for that information to appear.
Now, imagine, if that’s how it is for one developer, how it should be for everyone in the distribution system who is responsible for managing information for multiple developers. Do you still have a headache?
To summarize, the price you pay for following manual, laborious methods may include:
- Data that is out of date as soon as you search for it
- Frustrated, manufacturers, and distributors
- Risk of compliance and regulatory errors
- Losing the best people to an organization that makes their jobs easy and painless
The good news is that AgentSync can help solve this problem for your insurance company and its partners. On my end, I have no choice but to fill out forms for the umpteenth time and pray that the day will come when anyone looking for my address will have it right. You have no idea how much I would give to get a solution in my hands that would make this problem disappear faster than my growing patience.
So, for all those people who don’t have an answer to the problems of data storage, book processes, and outdated technology wherever this may arise in life, don’t you owe it to yourself to check out AgentSync?