Enabling profitable growth: agent portals need to help agents grow as well as lower operating costs.

Insurers have made significant progress in establishing agent portals over the past few years that provide agents with connectivity, product information, applications, commission information and various operational functions on a cost-effective basis. While there is still much to be done in terms of enhancing online business processing and lowering operating costs, the next phase of development also will involve further enabling profitable growth.

Some believe that this is primarily the realm of agency management systems, not carriers' portals for independent agency systems where integrating carriers' systems with agency management systems has been a major issue to overcome. While progress is being made in enabling that integration, there are also important areas where insurers can now significantly strengthen the ability of their agents and themselves to grow profitably. For direct writers and career agency systems, these drivers are being pursued more easily without the complexity of agents dealing with multiple carriers' systems.

The major drivers of profitable agency growth are increasingly reliant upon enabling technology to enhance their delivery, efficiency and effectiveness. The first efforts largely have been to enhance business processing. The next phase also will involve further supporting agency growth factors including the following:

Pursuing new markets and customers: An agent's most difficult challenge is often in identifying and obtaining new customers. Insurers using available technologies significantly can enhance their agent's ability to pursue new customers. Insurers are able to acquire and provide centralized access to target customer lists by geography for their agents to enable them to directly market to them while addressing the do-not-call requirements. Carriers also are establishing online programs with sponsoring Web sites, as well as their own Web sites to generate customer traffic to participating agencies.

Leveraging renewals: Maintaining existing customer relationships can be enhanced via carrier programs that inform and support agent contact with their customers prior to renewal. Programs that support agents conducting customer updates as part of the renewal process have proven quite successful. This not only generates a higher retention rate, but it also enables agents to identify additional needs and sales opportunities.

Cross selling additional products to existing customers: Insurers also are able to help agents create proactive direct marketing programs to cross sell with their own client lists. The key driver is often establishing a usable client database with existing product sales and customer information. Reactive cross-selling support involves helping agents respond to customer service inquiries by providing tools, such as identifiers and probing questions, to identify client changes that may lead to additional needs and sales opportunities.

Providing timely, easy training support: Many agent portals already have some static training programs available. Increasingly utilizing Web-based seminars is a high impact approach to reach a significant number of agents as well as their key staff members on a cost effective and timely basis with new product or marketing approach information and programs.

Facilitating external product access and support: While an insurer primarily is interested in supporting access to its own products, providing efficient online access to products that the carrier does not choose to underwrite, such as specialty products, is also an important support function.

Continuing to drive underwriting processing efficiency: Agents continue to seek faster underwriting response to enable them to better serve their customers. Real-time access to underwriting status and inquiries is increasingly being demanded by agents. Carriers seek to support this since it substantially drives down processing costs and helps maintain their position as a preferred market for independent agents.

Enabling business transparency: While agents continue to seek real-time access into carrier systems, carriers also want efficient access into agents' books of business to evaluate underwriting quality. In addition to aiding business processing efficiency, increased business transparency via online information access will enable a stronger focus on underwriting profitability for both agencies and carriers.

Leading insurers are continuing to use agent portals to drive down costs while expanding services to further support growth. In order to help justify the growth-oriented investments, it's important to conduct initial test programs as well as establish effective monitoring systems to measure their ongoing impact. Sustaining profitable growth will require both lower processing costs and increased sales support via the agent portal.

Steven Landberg is a managing director and founder of Alpha Financial Services Consulting, Greenwich, Conn. He can be reached at [e-mail].