For the past few days I have been talking about the blind spots of the agency management system vendors. While I feel that they haven’t moved far enough fast enough.
Agencies spend thousands of hard dollars on agency management systems. They waste thousands of dollars in using them inefficiently or not using them to their maximum potential. What leads to this waste?
Poor or lack of definition of standards, procedures and workflows. Thus everyone one uses the system differently or does not use it in some instances. So when someone else needs to find information about the client, it may or may not be easily accessible in the system. While these are huge problems in agencies, I want to concentrate here on the agency’s interaction with their agency management system vendors.
As I previously said, every visit with an agency involves at least one conversation about an issue with their agency management system. I am often asked to discuss the issue with the vendor. While every vendor listens, answers questions and thanks me for the input, I have no power and nothing gets done. Users are going to need to band together and put “REAL” pressure on vendors in order to get things done.
I am not aware of one agency management system that does not have at least one area that is used daily that doesn’t need a “work-around”. In some systems, agencies tell me that there are one or more of these situations that have existed for one or more years. Why in this period of time does such an issue get resolved by the vendor. Sometimes there is not pressure from the users to get the issue fixed. I find that agencies can’t always effectively communicate the problem to the vendor. Also, they can’t always communicate how the functionality should work. Or the vendor is getting conflicting information from various users.
Monday I will talk about some ideas on how to get your message to your vendors. Please share this blog with others in the insurance industry and add your comments.
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