Data Life and Health Insurance Agents Need to Track
A rising need for life and health insurance agents is not only converting your internal processes into efficient, streamlined approaches but getting a full look at how your business is fairing overall.
A deep dive into understanding of your book of business can help you make informed decisions for the future and pivot to ensure the success of your agency. Without these insights, you can be at a disadvantage trying to run and manage a thriving insurance agency.
Essentially, it’s the need to turn your big data into smart data. Before we get started, let’s define the two:
Big Data: Big data is extensive information that is gathered about anything. It could be about coffee consumption, holiday shopping behavior, or, for you, it’s about your insurance agency.
Smart Data: Smart Data” means information that actually makes sense. It is the difference between seeing a long list of numbers referring to weekly sales vs. identifying the peaks and troughs in sales volume over time. Algorithms turn meaningless numbers into actionable insights. Smart data is data from which signals and patterns have been extracted by intelligent algorithms. Collecting large amounts of statistics and numbers bring little benefit if there is no layer of added intelligence.
Unlocking Your Smart Data with an Agency Management System
A key feature for your insurance agency to access your smart data is an agency management system (AMS). A true industry-specific AMS will give you insight into your data.
There are a couple of ways to achieve this:
- An intuitive dashboard
- Customizable reports
Using an Interactive Dashboard
A dashboard allows you to work from anywhere whilst always knowing exactly what needs to be done. It keeps all of your saved information, to-dos, and real-time graphs a click away. Basically, it’s your one-stop shop to get a high-level overview of where your company is and what you’ve got on your plate today.
A dashboard can be made up of a variety of things like running lists, activity to-dos, and real-time graphs. Each of which you can use to keep a pulse on your overall book of business.
Activity tasks help you stay on top of your to-do list while graphs give you the high-level insight into your book of business.
Do you want to know the breakdown of commissions by agent? There’s a graph for that. Do you want to know the breakdown of your in-force policies by coverage type? There’s also a graph for that. Or do you want to see all of your policies broken down by carrier? You guessed it, there’s a graph for that.
Utilizing this information, get a quick view into the health of your business as a whole to understand where you need to investigate further for development and care.
Using Customizable Reports
Dive deeper into your book of business with custom reporting. The benefits of reports are that they drill down into a certain data set to show you the breakdown of what’s going on.
Use this information to make smart, data-led decisions for your agency’s well-being.
One example of this journey is understanding your carrier representation within your book of business. Say you notice (by looking at a real-time graph) a certain carrier is making up less and less of your book of business breakdown. You run a report and notice that, in the last 6 months, your policies with that carrier have dwindled by 30%.
You can then use that information to ask intelligent questions of your agents and other essential personnel about why. Maybe the commissions with that carrier are declining or perhaps there’s coverage from a different carrier that’s better suited for your audience. Whatever the reason, you can use this big data that you’ve analyzed and converted into smart data to better understand the reason for the happenings inside your business.
With this information, you can make the necessary pivots that your company needs to continue thriving in the future.
Top Reports to Run
We pulled together some of the most crucial reports you should consider running each month.
This information was pulled together by analyzing AgencyBloc report usage and interviews with AgencyBloc clients. These clients range in size, including IMO/FMOs as well as independent insurance agents.
The top 8 reports you should consider running each month:
- Production Report: This report will show you all of the policies your agency has brought on for any given month. Use this report in conjunction with your policy in-force graph from your Personal Dashboard.
- Pending Policy Report: This report will show you all of the pending policies your agency currently has and why they’re still listed as pending. You may also want to include activities to see what your agent’s timeline is to close the pending policy.
- New Leads Report: This report will show you all of the new leads your agency has brought in for any given month. Uplevel this report by running the demographics and lead source of your leads to better know where to advertise and spend your money.
- New Groups Report: This report will show you all of the new group leads your agency has brought in for any given month. Set yourself up for potential cross-sells by including coverage type on the report. Do they just have health? What about life or ancillary products?
- Group Employee Census Report: This report will show you all of the active full-time employees within your groups for any given month. Run this census against all employees to understand who didn’t opt-in and why.
- Agent Pipeline Report: This report will show you all the leads and prospects an agent is working with for any given month. Forecast future revenue and be better prepared for potential slow months by monitoring what’s in each agent’s pipeline.
- Commissions Received Report: This report will show you all of the commissions your agency received from all carriers for any given month. Break it down further by isolating a certain carrier or coverage type.
- Commissions Paid Out Report: This report will show you all of the commissions you paid out to your agents for any given month. Hone in on particular agents to use during annual reviews to help your agents improve year over year and reach both of your goals.
Running these reports each month can help you gain strategic insight into a variety of areas within your book of business. However, there will likely be others you’ll want to run in addition to these that are more aligned with your position.
For example, as a sales manager, you may want to run new policies by agent, lead source by agent or in general, new policies by coverage type, etc.
These are core reports that will show you the most critical information. The beauty with a custom report builder is that you can take this core report and then add in any ancillary information you want.
For example, instead of just running a generic new client report, you could run a new client with specific demographics included about each client. This way you know more about the audience your agency is attracting. Use this information to make advertising decisions in the future and other decisions pertaining to additional verticals.
To access reports like this, you need an agency management system with custom reporting—like Custom Reports in AgencyBloc. You build the report once, then save it to run month after month. You can also duplicate them if you want to run the same core report with different ancillary components.
To learn more about these reports and how to build them, check out our free downloadable templates: The Big Book of Custom Report Recipes.
Posted
by Allison Babberl
on Tuesday, August 27, 2019
in
Reporting & Data Analysis
- data management
About The Author
Allison is the Content Lead at AgencyBloc. She manages the creation and schedule of all educational content for our BlocTalk and Member communities. Favorite quote: “Conversation is the bedrock of relationships. Without it, our relationships are devoid of substance.” -Maribeth Ku
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