This article is part of a series sponsored by AgentSync.
Compliance and producer management are like the proverbial frog in the pot. If you’re new to a new organization, disorganized compliance practices, manual processes, and missing producer data will be obvious like a waving red flag. But when you’re struggling to keep up with a manual onboarding process on top of everything else you need to do your job, these errors and data gaps can slowly accumulate until they become overwhelming.
So, how do you properly identify key areas of concern within a producer’s management process before you become the frog in the pot of compliance issues? Do you know how to measure your success or failure?
For your own evaluation, we’ve compiled the top three categories we use to evaluate an organization’s compliance effectiveness, along with the criteria we see organizations use to objectively measure results. If you answered “yes” to all three questions, you probably don’t have a compliance issue. However, for most people working in the insurance industry, you will probably recognize that one or more of these symptoms point to your own compliance hiccup (stay tuned for how to actually fix it!).
1. Is your compliance immediate, integrated and automated?
With data that’s constantly updated and integrated across your entire technology stack, your teams can make better decisions at every stage of your business.
However, outdated information can weigh down your infrastructure. Compliance processes that involve delays, silos, and manual input can place a significant drag on agencies and operators’ internal processes. They are unable to make informed, fast decisions, and each decision requires manual profile verification or the risk of skipping necessary compliance steps entirely.
It’s an open industry secret that the way in-house compliance teams currently handle compliance is through manual processes, legacy systems and hours of emails and phone calls. But this is not necessarily the case. Here’s a comparison of businesses before and after implementing an automated compliance solution. If you find yourself identifying with “before,” you may need a compliance upgrade:
- forward: Chief compliance officers often take their work home on the weekends and maintain manual compliance only in Texas.
- back: He can now maintain a business during business hours, managing producers in all 50 states in less time than he used to manage a single state.
- forward: The business has two full-time compliance officers, but there is still a lack of clarity on its compliance rates. As a business with a promising future, the executive team had been concerned about state compliance reviews.
- back: They reduced the workload of two compliance officers by 25%, freeing them up to leverage their knowledge elsewhere in the company. the best is? By understanding their data, they went from having severe uncertainty about compliance to having 100% confidence that every sale was performed correctly by someone with the appropriate licenses and designations.
- forward: A compliance official said a newly hired Category 1 agent will be asked to set aside two weeks for manual processing and data entry.
- back: The entire process of onboarding a new class of agents takes two hours.
Do you recognize yourself before or after? Do you have access to your compliance and producer data for decision-making, or does it need to be mined? Think about it, how much time does it take these manual digging hours to find the right product every week? Per year? As one AgentSync customer said: “We don’t bill for our time, but the fact is, the company spends a lot more on me than it does on AgentSync. Now it’s automatic and effortless .”
2. Do you provide a world-class agent experience?
As talent retention becomes critical, businesses that provide agents with data and self-service tools can put themselves in a strong position. It’s no surprise that agents value the speed at which they generate revenue.
For businesses that fail to get the hang of the agent experience, they spend thousands or even millions of dollars on recruiting programs to attract experienced, reputable downstream partners. But due to ongoing churn, they will never see ROI on this spend as agents churn during or shortly after onboarding.
Data comes from Report co-sponsored by AgentSync and research firm Aite-Novaricahaving digital options and fast service are key to recruiting the next generation of producers.
Research reports that 97% of young agents believe speed and quote times are important to doing business. However, 54% of agents said their assigned carrier does not offer online or mobile onboarding options.
If the following paradigm sounds familiar to you, your compliance may be a barrier to attracting and retaining reliable agents:
- forward: The average onboarding experience for a company takes weeks or even months. Although the compliance and operations teams knew from experience that this was within industry norms, the entire organization was dissatisfied.
- back: With solutions that prioritize a world-class agent experience, the onboarding process from start to finish takes just days, sometimes even hours!
- forward: A compliance officer spends hours of manual labor onboarding a new producer.
- back: Once a business has implemented a modern solution, the same results are now just a few clicks away.
- forward: In the previous solution, a name or address change for a single agent meant operations team members had to search through numerous external country websites.
- back: Agents are authorized by the agent portal to control their own information. Bi-directional data synchronization enables agents to update and correct their information directly, rather than having information trapped in email and voicemail and requiring hours of manual middleman labor.
The end result of emphasizing agent experience is that companies with automated compliance solutions retain great agents. By retaining great agents, they spend less on recruiting efforts and can thrive through referrals from existing partners who are already excited. As one AgentSync customer said, “Having data immediately helps me stand out and impress my colleagues and our new hires.”
3. Data intelligence optimizes distribution
We want to be able to justify our business decisions through data and business intelligence, but our choices are often made based on instinct and intuition.
If your compliance and producer management stuff is bundled with spreadsheets and sticky notes, you probably have Data can make smart decisions, but dirty data can’t usable Instead, you’re operating in the dark and potentially wasting thousands of dollars in unnecessary appointments or permits, not to mention risking fines due to opaque compliance practices.
While we would guess that the number of businesses wanting to make informed, data-driven decisions is closer to 100%, even operators who have built their businesses on long-term actuarial data are at a loss when it comes to their own business data, according to a study , 75% of financial and insurance services executives”Challenged by the fragmented nature and vast amounts of available data”.
If you’ve ever worked in a business plagued by siled manual data on spreadsheets, personal drives, emails, and sticky notes, this statistic isn’t entirely surprising. In fact, one industry blogger asserted that “A shocking 88% of business profiles are idle”.
but if you Can Access and analyze your data?
- forward: A compliance officer used to spend weekends manually compiling reports on how much his business was spending on licensing fees.
- back: With transparent and accessible data reporting in a comprehensive compliance solution, he can generate a report in just two minutes that helps him optimize business expenses. His business operations are leaner than ever, and he can enjoy his weekends again.
- forward: One compliance officer described her company’s approach to compliance as “constantly reactive,” as the team has no choice but to submit a license application to a state and then wait to see if critical information is missing.
- back: The business has de-risked its distribution channel, was able to seamlessly move DRLP across 50 states in less than two weeks, and is now taking a predictive strategic approach to growth. Since losing data is a thing of the past, they can selectively apply for licenses in only necessary areas and transfer business to licensed providers in specific sales areas without the need for extensive phone calls.
By setting alerts to only flag applications that require attention, compliance teams using automated compliance systems to refresh data no longer need to touch every application. A well-ordered business drives itself, leaving only poorly organized paperwork and red-flagging the business to draw real attention and allow the business to drill down into important data.
Continuing will slowly drain your business.
If you’re struggling with manual compliance and producer management inefficiencies, we understand. There are times when you can barely keep your head above water and survival feels like an achievement.
But barely doing it is not what success looks like. If a team can’t take time off while everything comes to a standstill, then they can’t perform at their best. Teams that make decisions based on current circumstances are also not the teams that will do their best work. A team that plans for long-term growth.
So, think about what percentage of your efforts were wasted this week. Is this a normal week? Multiply that number by 52, and that’s what you’re going to pay for this year and every year you’re stuck with ineffective compliance. Manual compliance as hell.
Stop holding on. It’s time for compliance to rock, agents to join you, and business data to your advantage. AgentSync time.
