Making sure employees are working on what’s most important is a core competency of any enterprise with productivity on its list of KPIs. But the power to focus only on crucial tasks is diminished once you introduce convoluted processes, obstructed data, and redundant workflows. As a result, your business grinds to a halt.
Maintaining a competitive edge means coupling expediency with the ability to protect, process and capitalize on vast amounts of data. In short, you need to ensure tasks, workflows and staff are all aligned. To achieve this harmony, your people must have the tools to get their jobs done accurately and efficiently. Every keystroke in every workstation should be aligned toward a common goal, even as that goal is continually redefined.
The cost of inefficient processes
Consider how much time it takes your account managers to produce a single activity or suspense. Even if these individual actions require less than a minute, you have to multiply that time by the volume of actions you process on a daily basis. For some agencies, that amounts to thousands of seconds per day.
When you spread those seconds across your employees, you begin to see how much time is wasted by traditional data recording methods, and that’s assuming all the information has been entered correctly. Once you start adding mistakes to the mix, seconds can quickly become minutes.
In order to identify and improve upon inefficient processes, Vertafore launched Project Impact in 2024. Staff shadowed servicers at independent agencies of all shapes and sizes, observing their day-to-day workflows in AMS360, Sagitta and WorkSmart. From this, the Vertafore team identified opportunities to streamline important workflows and reduce the time spent on routine tasks.
Ultimately, improving these processes is expected to deliver up to two hours of savings per day per account manager at independent insurance agencies.
How independent insurance agencies can adopt intelligent workflows
Keeping your people and productivity on track is where intelligent workflow enters the picture. Where your managers are bogged down by clerical tasks that take them away from generating new business, intelligent workflow helps alleviate some of the burden. The end result is a re-energized workforce that leverages the right skillsets for the right tasks.
With intelligent workflows that route the right work to the right person at the right time, you save multiple hours per day that you might spend untying process knots. You can then devote that time to getting the work done – whether it’s innovation, service delivery, or closing a pesky funnel you’ve been after for way too long.
Smart businesses exploit smart workflows to optimize processes. Controlling your expenses is crucial—improving processes results in better decisions, better customer service and a growing customer portfolio without a ballooning budget.
Take advantage of your place behind the steering wheel. Put intelligent workflow in the hands of your IT gurus, claims managers, underwriting managers and at-large staff and empower them to grow business with automated manual processes, improved resource allocation, streamlined workforce demands and better agent services. Make sure the team you hired can do the work that needs to be done.
