This post is part of a series sponsored by AgentSync.
Compliance and producer management are like the proverbial frog boiling in a pot. If you were fresh into a new organization, disorganized compliance practices, manual processes, and missing vendor data would be shockingly obvious, like a waving red flag. But if you’re struggling to keep up with the manual onboarding processes on top of all the other things your job requires, these errors and data gaps slowly build up until they become overwhelming.
So before you start bubbling like a frog in a pot of compliance issues, how can you properly identify the key problem areas in your producer management processes? And do you have any idea how to measure your own success or failure?
For your own evaluation, here are the three key categories we use to evaluate an organization’s compliance effectiveness, as well as the criteria we believe organizations use to objectively measure results. If you can answer “yes” to all three questions, there may not be a compliance issue. For most people who work in the insurance industry, you may recognize one or more of these symptoms that point to your own little compliance problem (stay tuned to see how you can actually solve it!).
1. Is your compliance real-time, integrated and automated?
With data that is always up to date and integrated into your technology stack, your team can make better decisions at every stage of your business.
However, outdated information puts a strain on your infrastructure. Compliance processes that involve delays, siloing, and manual input place a huge burden on agencies’ and carriers’ internal processes. Instead of being able to make informed and quick decisions, every decision involves manual data review or risk, necessary Skip compliance steps altogether.
It is an open industry secret that internal compliance teams currently deal with compliance using manual processes, legacy systems and hours of emails and phone calls. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Below are before and after profiles of companies that have implemented automated compliance solutions. If you identify with the “before,” you may need a compliance upgrade:
- BEFORE: The Chief Compliance Officer routinely took his work home on weekends to maintain manual compliance in the state of Texas alone.
- AFTER: He now maintains business within business hours and manages producers in all 50 states in less time than he previously did for a single state.
- BEFORE: Because this company had two full-time compliance officers, there was still a lack of clarity about compliance rates. Because it was a company with an aggressive growth trajectory, the leadership team feared a government compliance audit.
- AFTER: They reduced the workload of both compliance officers by 25 percent and gave them the opportunity to use their knowledge elsewhere for the company. The best part? By looking at their own data, they were able to move away from the serious uncertainty surrounding compliance with regulations and be 100 percent confident that every sale was being conducted properly by someone with the appropriate license and designation.
- BEFORE: One compliance officer said that for a single newly hired class of agents he would have to allow two weeks of manual processing and data entry.
- AFTER: The entire onboarding process of a new agent class takes two hours.
Do you recognize yourself in the before or after? Do you have access to your compliance and manufacturer data at the time of decision making or is research required? Think about how much this hour-long manual search is costing you every week to find the right information? Each year? As one AgentSync customer said: “We don’t charge for our own time, but the truth is that the company spent a lot more money on me trying to fight my way through compliance than on AgentSync, where it is now happens automatically and effortlessly.”
2. Do you offer a best-in-class agent experience?
As talent retention becomes increasingly important, companies that empower their agents with data and self-service tools are putting themselves in an advantageous position. It’s no surprise that brokers value generating sales quickly.
Companies that don’t understand the basics of agent experience spend thousands or even millions of dollars on recruiting programs to attract experienced, reputable downstream partners. However, due to constant churn, they will never see the ROI of this spend as agents leave during the onboarding phase or shortly after.
Digital options and fast service are critical to recruiting the next generation of producers, according to data from a report AgentSync co-sponsored with research firm Aite-Novarica.
The study found that 97 percent of young agents viewed speed and time to offer as extremely important in getting business done. Still, 54 percent of agents reported that their contracted wireless carriers did not offer an online or mobile onboarding option.
If the following examples sound familiar, your compliance may be a barrier to attracting and retaining solid agents:
- BEFORE: One company was struggling with an average onboarding experience that took weeks, sometimes even months. Although the compliance and operations teams knew from experience that this was in line with industry norms, the entire organization was dissatisfied.
- AFTER: With solutions that prioritize a superior agent experience, the onboarding process from start to finish has become a matter of days, sometimes even hours!
- BEFORE: A compliance officer struggled with hours of manual work to onboard a single new producer.
- AFTER: Once the company implements modern solutions, the same result is just a few clicks away.
- BEFORE: In a previous solution, changing a single agent’s name or address meant an operations team member searching numerous external government websites.
- AFTER: Agents have agent portals and can control their own information. Two-way data synchronization allows agents to update and correct their information directly, rather than intercepting information in emails and voicemails and requiring hours of manual work through intermediaries.
The end result of this emphasis on agent experience is that companies with automated compliance solutions retain good agents. By retaining top-notch agents, they invest less in recruiting and can instead benefit from recommendations from enthusiastic existing partners. As one AgentSync customer said, “Having data right at my fingertips allows me to shine and impress my colleagues and our recruits alike.”
3. Data intelligence to optimize distribution
We want to be able to justify our business decisions with data and business intelligence, but often our decisions are made by instinct and gut feeling.
If your compliance and producer management data is recorded in spreadsheets and sticky notes, you may have the data to make smart decisions, but dirty data is not usable data. Instead, you’re left in the dark and potentially wasting thousands of dollars in fees on unnecessary appointments or licenses, not to mention risking fines for opaque compliance practices.
While we estimate the number of companies wanting to make intelligent, data-driven decisions is close to 100 percent, even transportation companies that have built their business on long-term actuarial data are at a loss when it comes to their own business data. According to one study, 75 percent of financial and insurance services executives are “challenged by fragmentation and the enormous amount of data available.”
This statistic isn’t a complete surprise if you’ve worked in a company plagued by siled, manual data stored on spreadsheets, personal drives, emails, and sticky notes. In fact, one industry blogger claims, “A staggering 88 percent of corporate data remains unused.”
But what if you could access and analyze your data?
- BEFORE: A compliance officer spent weekends manually creating reports on how his company spent money on royalties.
- AFTER: With transparent and accessible data reporting in a comprehensive compliance solution, it takes him two minutes to create a report that helps him optimize fees for his company. His business is running leaner than ever and he has his weekends back.
- BEFORE: A compliance officer described her company’s compliance approach as “constantly reactive” because the team had no choice but to submit license applications to a state and wait to see if important information was missed.
- AFTER: This company de-risked its sales pipeline, was able to seamlessly transition a DRLP across 50 states in less than two weeks, and is now taking a forward-looking, strategic approach to growth. With missing data a thing of the past, they can apply for targeted licenses only in the required areas and redirect business to licensed providers in specific sales territories without the hassle of phone calls.
Because alerts are set to only flag applications that require attention, compliance teams using automated compliance systems populated with data no longer need to touch every application. A business that is in order drives itself forward, leaving only out-of-order paperwork and red-flag businesses for hands-on attention, allowing the business to gain deeper insight into the data that matters.
If you continue, your business will slowly be drained
If you’re treading water on the inefficiencies of manual compliance and producer management, we understand. Sometimes you can barely keep your head above the surface and surviving feels like an achievement.
But barely making it is not success. Teams that can’t take a vacation without everything grinding to a halt are not teams that can perform at their best. Teams that make decisions based on current events are not teams that plan for longevity.
So think about what percentage of your efforts this week were wasted. Was it a normal week? Take that number times 52, and that’s what your inefficient compliance is costing you this year, and every year that you stay in the ever-hot pot of hellish manual compliance.
Stop moving on. It’s time for compliance that excites, agents that are excited to join you, and business data that gives you an edge. It’s time for AgentSync.
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2024-03-28 04:05:11
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