Part 2: Crush Policyholder Services Costs & Turbocharge Customer Experience
Our last blog post in this series took you on a deep dive into the benefit opportunities awaiting you when it comes to bringing “industrial-grade” standardization to your distribution and sales network operations.
In this posting—Part 2 of “Big Rock 3”—we’d like to drill down to the KPIs that can help you identify (and eradicate) those margin-sucking “value vampires.” We’ll show you how business intelligence (BI) advanced analytics can help you see how to make clearer, better-informed decisions. And we’ll cap it all off with a quick peek at robotic process automation or RPA, and how it can not only accelerate daily mundane processes, but also turbocharge prospecting, outreach, renewals, and more.
The topic of “value vampires” addresses just a single key performance indicator or KPI: Net Margin (i.e., earned premium minus labor expense). But there are other leading and lagging indicators that must be taken into account, such as:
You’d think that any income-motivated agent would carve out as much time as possible to the one key activity that defines their careers: Selling.
Exceptional agents do. Most of the others don’t. Take a look at the chart below.
As you can see, the agents in this office spend a mere 20 percent of their day selling.
This is happening, right now, across your distribution network. You’re simply not seeing it, not documenting it.
But look at all the other “activities” that are eating up their days:
By the way, there are invariably going to be agents who want to “coast” on their existing book of premiums and renewals, and won’t want to sell new policies. The Lab identifies them. It’s the basic KPI: “Net Sales Growth.” You might also wonder about agent turnover. It’s a big problem. Not all salespeople can cut it. The Lab can show which offices have the highest turnover rates (a red flag for hiring and training); we can also filter out the short tenure agents from the larger picture, to give a normalized view of actual agent performance.
As you’ve surely realized by now, once you have normalized data that’s accurately updated and populated, you can slice-and-dice it to your liking; and you can rank performance and create scorecards.
In the “old days,” this would mean poring over countless tabs of Excel spreadsheets that you hope are updated. But with The Lab on your side, we harness advanced analytics to give you live, instantly-updated business intelligence (BI) visualizations that let you see how things stack up.
You could sit down with one of these visualizations, right now, without any training, and put it to powerful use. That’s because it’s completely intuitive. It’s like your own little private web page, that you can access from your computer or mobile device. From there, it’s simple to select filters and see how the graphs populate—on the fly.
So you can choose date-ranges to spot performance trends over time. You can select different regions and see how they compare. You can filter by agency size and look for patterns.
And you can drill down. Instantly. This is one of the most compelling—indeed, addictive—aspects of BI. Simply click on a region and everything populates. You’ll see each agency. Click on any one, and you’ll see each agent within it. That’s right—even agencies that, on the surface, appear to be high-performers hide their own groups of margin-sucking “value vampire” agents!
You’ve probably heard about robotic process automation, or RPA. The Lab routinely brings this technology to P&C insurers, and nowhere is the potential as powerful as it is in the distribution and sales network.
If you’re new to RPA, check out the inset below:
Consider, for example, all of the tedious keystrokes associated with policy application data entry. Let the bot take all that work off of the agents’ hands: scraping info from PDF forms and entering it into the policy management system, generating the update emails to policyholders, and so on.
More bots save more time. Think of how easily they can catch, fix, or kick back the dreaded “NIGO”—“not in good order”—information on applications and forms. This speeds underwriting, pricing, and policy issuance…while improving policyholder satisfaction at the exact same time.
Again, that’s a straightforward “let the bot do the tedious existing work” use-case. But it gets much better—more exciting—than that. Examining the vital activities that occur in areas such as prospecting, cross-selling, and sales management will reveal a swarm of common but “understandardized” work activities. Transform the informal tribal knowledge and rules-of-thumb that guide those areas into repeatable, “bot-ready” processes to deliver staggering benefits. Consider:
If you’re looking to crush distribution costs while boosting performance and policyholder experience, contact The Lab today to schedule your no-obligation 30-minute screen-sharing demo. We’ll answer any questions you may have. We’ll show you how our services self-fund in six months or less, guaranteed. And you’ll also see how we deliver all this power—remotely, from our U.S. offices in Houston.
