As promised in yesterday’s post today I am going to talk about Real Time and future enhancements. I recently read a blog that said if you are just keeping up with technology you are behind. You must be looking to the future and anticipating what your clients will need and want.
At a recent industry event they asked each of us to tell them what we wanted to hear about and get out of the event. I said that I wanted to hear their thoughts and planning on the use of touch screen technology.
Their response was "interesting" and they continued to move around the room for other’s comments. In the two days we were there this particular subject was never discussed. However, somewhere in the discussions another subject was raised about future technology trends and the essence of the response was; We can’t get the users to learn the system they have today, how are we going to deal with more technology or why would we want to. Not every vendor has this approach but I find that at least 50% do.
I believe that it has taken far too long to have the functionalities needed for Real Time. What I heard in the meeting cited seems to always have been the attitude of both the agency management system vendors and the insurance carriers as well. Microsoft Word does things I haven’t even thought of. But Microsoft doesn’t write the program to my level. They write the program to the desires and needs of their most advanced users.
Agencies need better Real Time now. Where are their client portals? How difficult can this be? I’ve been banking online for how many years? If they can give us our information securely why can’t agency management systems? Why isn’t there two way communication between the agency managements system and Smart Phones? Some struggle to do one way communication correctly. My personal pet peeve, why can’t we do drag-and-drop with our attachments that are outside the system that need to be inside the system? Some systems don’t allow the attachment of voice (.wav) files. What’s up with this?
I don’t really consider these functions of the future. These should all be functionalities that are working now. Then we could be talking about touch screen, Smart Phone applications and a wealth of other ideas. Tomorrow the subject will be data and ACORD forms.
