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How Our Vision To Create A “Highly Productive System” Unintentionally Ended Up Re-Engineering  The Agency Management System

When I started this project of designing an agency management system it wasn’t my intent at that time to literally re-engineer the agency management system nor did I think that was what I would do. I just simply wanted to design a system that would massively increase your productivity which in turn would massively increase your profitability so you’d have the money and time to work “on” your agency and grow your agency.

What you personally may not realize is all of the areas that affect your productivity in a management system. There are a lot.

For example, a hard to learn and use system will take your staff a lot more time to become proficient at using it, yet the sooner they become proficient the sooner they become an asset to the agency with the ability to support a larger number of clients and policies.

Plus, hiring a new person with a hard to use system and then the process of training them becomes a nightmare, literally!

Therefore, I knew the system had to be very easy to use. Of course I already knew how important “easy to use” was because of the many survey’s I’ve done in this industry and from the literally hundreds of agencies I’ve worked with all telling me they wanted an easy-to-use system. I heard you all loud and clear!

There’s also the design of the system, there’s having common-sense menus and there’s having workflows like CSR’s would process their work, to name a few more things.

I Did A Thorough Analysis.

To create a system that will massively increase your productivity:

  • We dug deep into analyzing workflows and all of the steps involved in processing a transaction including all of the parts of the system that are used when processing a transaction with flow charts and outlines, and we did this for all of the transactions (new application, renewal, endorsements, claims, etc.) and for both personal lines and commercial lines policies;
  • We looked at ways to further automate your job while still maintaining flexibility because not every agency does it the same way;
  • We dissected the job of the CSR to understand at a very deep level every thing a CSR is doing, tracking and managing; and
  • We looked at all of the parts of the management system and how they’re using in each transaction.

This analysis wasn’t hard because as an Insurance Automation Consultant I’m an expert in workflows and productivity strategies and I know management systems intimately, but the analysis was definitely time consuming. That’s because the end objective was to create a blueprint for an agency management system that would massively increase your productivity!

To accomplish this we literally tore the management system down, piece by piece, feature by feature to include tracking how the data flows through the system to create a single-entry system. All of this really opened up our eyes.

From tearing it down and being focused on creating a massively productive system we realized that all of the different parts of the system like policy management, notes, follow-ups, etc. had to be completely re-engineered if we were going to create the massively productive system we were after.

I’m telling you, this became a huge job which has taken far longer to complete due to how committed we are to creating a system that will massively increase your productivity. This task is not something that someone who doesn’t have the experience and expertise’s in workflows, productivity strategies and programming like I have could have done.

This is why you see so many “feature-driven” systems on the market… these other vendors just don’t understand the workflows or how to create a productive agency like us consultants do.

As An Insurance Automation Consultant I Have a Very High Expectation For The Management Systems I Work With!

As an insurance automation consultant I have a very high expectation for the management systems I work with. That’s because my profession is helping agencies to create a productive, efficient and profitable agency realizing the management system is the core and most important tool to accomplish this task. Believe me, I know from experience and from working with so many agencies, management systems are not created equal!

Thankfully, after over 25 years of working with agencies hand in hand and having worked on so many other systems I knew exactly what I wanted the system to do. I also knew what I wanted to avoid!

I wasn’t asking for too much.

Okay, maybe I was asking for a lot considering nobody else had accomplished what I was trying to accomplish yet. I just knew from my many years of working with management systems that in order to help agencies become productive these systems had to be converted from being feature-driven to being process-driven, or better stated, “workflow driven”.

… in order to help agencies become productive these systems had to be converted from being feature-driven to being process-driven, or better stated, “workflow driven”.

As I got into this project doing the design work I realized very quickly that how things are currently done in other system won’t provide me with the result I’m looking for.

Oh sure, the old way basically did the job but at a cost of time with too many steps. In some cases this was caused by too much double entry, or because of too many steps and windows to process a task, two of a hundred things. The list of problems with the old way continued to grow, and with the power we have with today’s software that just wasn’t acceptable!

So, to create the outcome I was after, I ended up thinking completely outside of the box and re-designing how things worked so the agencies I worked with would get the results they wanted. I mean, isn’t that ultimately the bottom line… the results you get from the software you use?

What result are you after with your agency management system?

A few years ago I was talking to another automation consultant in the industry and demo’ing some of the things we were doing with our systems. As I was showing him many of the different automation strategies, tools and better ways of processing a CSRs work he stops me and says, “Brad, do you realize you have literally re-engineered the agency management system?”

“Brad, do you realize you have literally re-engineered the agency management system?”

Up to that point I honestly hadn’t realized just what I had done until he pointed it out to me. But he was right, I had completely re-engineered the agency management system.

All I knew was I was bound and determined to create a management system that would, being redundant here, massively increase your productivity, which is exactly what I created.

What he observed and pointed out was we didn’t mimic any of the other systems on the market. I knew that.

Instead, we took a look at how agencies do their work and designed a system to handle their day to day work in a more efficient, streamlined way. When you consider my ultimate goal is to help agencies to massively increase their productivity, or said differently, to massively decrease their workload, you can see how we ultimately ended up re-engineering the management system.

Bluntly, it was unavoidable if we were going to accomplish what we had set out to accomplish. Otherwise we would’ve ended up with just another feature driven system like everything else out there, and that wouldn’t have been acceptable!

The point here is my focus wasn’t on creating just another “agency management system”. That’s was never what I wanted. What I wanted was …

* A system that would allow the agency to massively increase their productivity which in turn would massively increase their profits (productivity and profits go hand in hand);

* I wanted a system that was very easy to use;

* I wanted a system that would integrate with carriers the way it should to eliminate all double-entry work.

I was after a result, and a clearly defined result at that! I was very focused on the system I wanted created.

Mimicking the other systems on the market was not going to give me this result which is why I had to re-think, or as the other consultant put it, re-engineer the agency management system.

I am certain that you will love what we’ve accomplished and will appreciate how much more productive and profitable our systems will allow you to be.

Check us out and see for yourself what we’ve accomplished with CP Manager. And then ask yourself, “What will I do with all of the time CP Manager has saved me and the increase in my agency profits by being more efficient?”

I strong encourage you to get a walk-through scheduled so you can experience CP Manager first hand.

Sincerely,

Bradley Chesnut, Insurance Automation Consultant
President