NetVU | Education | Chapters | NCOM | Partners
NetVU chapters are an integral part of the NetVU community. Each year, awards in several categories are given to recognize membership growth, innovation and service at the chapter level. This year, two chapters were recognized for their exemplary achievements — ImageRight NetVU Chapter and BenefitPoint Users Group.
ImageRight NetVU received the 2018 Chapter of the Year Award for outstanding growth, participation in the NetVU community and successful chapter initiatives. BenefitPoint Users Group received the 2018 Phoenix Award for showing the most improvement.
ImageRight NetVU broadened its reach so it could support all users of ImageRight, including carriers and MGAs. This led to a rebranding of the chapter that included a name change from WorkSmart to ImageRight.
The chapter initiated onboarding for new leaders and redesigned its monthly newsletter, The Bulletin. The newsletter template is being shared with other chapters as a resource for chapter leaders. The chapter also hosts quarterly meetings, which are primarily virtual and have enjoyed high attendance throughout the year.
Jayni Campbell, CISR, a corporate trainer and auditor with Marshall & Sterling Inc., Poughkeepsie, New York, is the chapter’s co-chair and says that being a virtual chapter “makes our meetings easier since we are all in different states. Sometimes we get lost in our day-to-day work, so to be able to be with a group of people who use the same products is very rewarding.”
BenefitPoint Users Recognized for Second Year
This is the second year in a row that BenefitPoint Users Group has won the Phoenix Award. Over the past year, the chapter has been growing with each meeting, improving its registration numbers and developing its pool of leadership talent. It has also increased its support to the BenefitPoint community on NCOM, where it focuses on member engagement.
Because BenefitPoint Users Group has committed to constant improvement, NetVU felt it was deserving of the Phoenix Award for a second year. “Being part of a NetVU chapter is rewarding on its own, but winning the Phoenix Award is an honor,” says Anthony Fronza, chapter chairman. “And to win it two years in a row? It’s incredible.”
Fronza, who is IT services manager with Conner Strong & Buckelew in Marlton, New Jersey, says it was “electrifying” for the chapter to be recognized at the recent Accelerate, powered by NetVU, conference for its “effort, dedication and execution throughout the year” by fellow chapter leaders and the collective members of NetVU. “We strive for growth and success every year,” he says.
In selecting annual award winners, NetVU seeks chapters that embody the dedication and commitment it takes to represent NetVU’s mission as well as provide outstanding volunteer service to NetVU and its members.
Among the criteria NetVU looks at in selecting chapter winners:
To find out more about NetVU’s awards program, see the Awards page on our website.
Maintaining passwords and IDs is the No. 1 pain point among carriers and agencies. And, as cybersecurity laws emerge and the use of multi-factor authentication (MFA) grows, credential management is a train wreck that’s about to get even worse.
We already own the technology solution to this industry-wide problem. SignOn Once was developed by a coalition of insurance and technology experts at ID Federation for the common good. It’s free of cost to agencies, and it can save your agency money. It will save my agency hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. And SignOn Once provides a solid solution to cybersecurity issues for carriers, but requires only a minimal investment from them.
So why aren’t we all on board?
Stop Tolerating the Status Quo Is it complacency? Have we become so desensitized to the daily inconvenience and costs associated with password and identity management that we are failing, as an industry, to seize a lifeline?
It’s time to sign up for SignOn Once.
Here is the assessment by the Network of Vertafore Users (NetVU):
"The entire industry should provide the necessary resources to fully support the ID Federation and movement to federated digital identities to replace agency stored passwords. Management system vendors must move to become identity providers and the carriers must support the initiative.”
— NetVU Strategic Industry Position Playbook
The Numbers If an agency has 100 employees who access 65 carriers or MGAs in the course of business, that agency is responsible for protecting no fewer than 6,500 IDs. As an agency owner, I must warranty the protection of our customers’ personal information, and, ultimately, I do not want any of my employees to know the user names and passwords or the MFAs to access our carriers and MGAs. [For more information on MFA, visit the Information Technology Laboratory, and stay tuned for more from Mike on MFA in an upcoming ID Federation blog.]
But I cannot control the access process without SignOn Once. This year alone, if all the carriers, MGAs and solution providers with whom our agency does business were participating in this one, industry-wide solution, SignOn Once would save my agency $325,000, or $50/ID/year.
And costs soon will escalate. NetVU reports that “the cost of compliance will start to run between $1,000 to $3,000 per employee per year” unless we all get on board with SignOn Once by ID Federation before the looming credential management Maelstrom arrives.
Get Federated If we all join SignOn Once, we can achieve an ideal state: Every agency and carrier will enjoy automatic provisioning and de-provisioning of users in one place via a trusted framework. Every employee will have just one ID and password that the agency can easily disable should that employee leave. The raging stream of help desk calls for password retrieval will stop. Just imagine the time, inconvenience and money we’ll all save while gaining ultimate security for our agencies and our customers’ personal information.
Questions? Don’t be complacent.
An Easy Way to Ask Your Carriers for SignOn Once
A number of carriers, MGAs and solution providers are already participating in SignOn Once. But most aren’t, or worse, are developing proprietary solutions that will complicate the overall credential management picture. Why? Agencies aren’t telling their carriers how important SignOn Once is to them.
Do it today. Send ID Federation’s easy, automated email to your carriers and MGAs to let them know you want SignOn Once.
Don’t let credential management become the Achilles’ heel of our industry. Implement SignOn Once by ID Federation as part of your cybersecurity solutions.
Since 2000, the number of people aged 65 and over who continue to remain employed has increased steadily. A large number of these professionals have gone through what economists call “unretirement,” the term for taking the employment U-turn from retired to back to work. For instance, a 2017 survey from RAND Corporation found that “almost 40 percent of workers over 65 had previously, at some point, retired.” Kathleen Mullen, RAND senior economist and co-author of its American Working Conditions Survey points to this study’s “evidence that retirement is fluid […] There’s less of the traditional schedule: work to a certain age, retire, see the world. We see people lengthening their careers.”
So what’s going on? Why are so many people attempting retirement but quitting it? It’s one thing to observe that veteran professionals are staying in the workforce longer, but it’s another to understand why. As Paul Davidson for USA Today explains it in his piece on workplace solutions to delay retirement, “[f]aced with a wave of Baby Boomer retirements and a worsening labor shortage, many employers are trying to hold on to their older workers, persuade some to return after retirement and even recruit those retired from other companies. They’re offering flexible arrangements that include part-time schedules and phased retirements that gradually reduce hours. And they’re often receptive to work-at-home set-ups.”
About the Author
Sharon Emek, Ph.D., CIC, is founder and CEO of Work At Home Vintage Experts (WAHVE). WHAVE is a unique contract staffing talent solution that brings companies and pretiring professionals together across the country to meet their work needs, full-time or part-time. WAHVE’s areas of specialty are insurance and accounting. Companies get the right matched talent and vintage experts get to extend their careers working from home. WAHVE.com
By Mike Foy. Originally published on Roughnotes.com
Use technology more intelligently and fully to better serve clients.
I learned many years ago that when a commercial lines client asks for a loss-run report, you can bet they are shopping for new coverage. That’s a good example of a lagging indicator because by the time you receive the request you may have already lost the account! What you want as an agent are leading indicators — data points that predict the future so you can take steps to retain business, sell additional coverage or improve customer service.
Leading indicators are the best, that’s for sure, but they require a disciplined approach to analytics. And that means access to the right information, preferably in real time, and data that is accurate and standardized from end to end—from the carrier to the vendor to the agent.
Download First The phrase “garbage in, garbage out” from the early days of computer programming still applies today. A good example is the data I download in real time from carriers. Don’t get me wrong—real-time download is a marvel and much preferred to the days of paper. But I would estimate the accuracy of downloaded data at about 80%. Unless it’s 100% reliable, I really can’t use it effectively for data analytics or third-party APIs. And if I do take the time to clean it up, will it get corrupted every time I do a new download?
What makes downloaded data inaccurate? Sometimes data is missing from fields. More often, coverage or rating codes are not standardized. One carrier’s Tier-4 rating may be different than another’s. Policy enhancements may be different. As a result, the codes are not consistent for my book of business.
Agents, companies and technology vendors can leverage and standardize data to identify leading indicators that can increase retention, reduce losses and generate new business—if we work together.
Suppose the data were reliable, though. Then I could create automated workflows for reviewing my customers’ policies. If a policy were renewing, I could measure what has changed in the last year. Obviously, price would be one thing. But I could also see what’s changed in the coverage, or what coverages are missing. Maybe the policyholder should have Enhancement #4, and the data indicates it hasn’t been purchased. If the workflow is automated, the system would flag it and notify my staff so they could follow up with the customer.
Today, my staff and I must do these comparisons by hand. It’s a painstaking process, and the human eye can make mistakes. If it were automated, I would be able to run my agency more efficiently. I’ve estimated that automating a basic 10-point checklist for renewals could save my agency over $250,000 a year! Automation could uncover additional premium opportunities for carriers while ensuring that my staff has the information to best serve our clients.
With reliable data, I could also do more to retain business. Which of our customers are most apt to shop for coverage elsewhere? Which ones might need an umbrella policy? Workers compensation?
eDocs, Rating & More This is but one area where companies, vendors and agents need to join together to work for the good of the independent agent channel. Another area that comes to mind is greater standardization and use of eDocs. More agents need to embrace this technology, and more carriers should be using eDocs in real time to push information and notifications to agencies. Vendors can assist by delivering these messages automatically to workflows in a format that agency employees can respond to easily.
The same could be said for real-time, multiple-company rating. Third-party data vendors should work with comparative raters to make their data available at the agent level to improve rating accuracy and reduce multiple entry of the same data. Real-time binding, along the lines of the PIA’s Buy Button concept, could also empower agents to bind coverage for prospects or clients who call on the phone, meet in person or visit online. The concept could be quickly adopted in personal lines in conjunction with an existing comparative rater or similar agency-managed tool. This would allow independent agents to fully compete in a digital world.
Then there’s the whole issue of credential management to protect data. The entire industry should be supporting ID Federation (www.idfederation.org) to create safe and secure digital credentials that replace the many user passwords that agencies currently maintain. The development of an effective digital identity infrastructure will increase agency use of real-time transactions and enable agencies to provide better customer service. Agencies spend too much time managing credentials for multiple carriers, solution providers and other business partners. That’s time they could invest in revenue-generating sales and service.
Where new cybersecurity rules require multi-factor authentication (MFA), it’s often accomplished by having the host website generate and email or text a temporary one-time PIN or password the user must enter before completing log-in. Handling these one-time PINs can create added control and management headaches for agency owners. It may be okay for consumers to have PINs texted to their personal cell phones, but agencies need a more secure way of dealing with them.
At my agency, they are emailed to the users, so we can track them. That addedlear step creates extra downtime and additional costs. I’ve done some calculations and estimate that the new MFA requirements will cost the industry $3,000 per user per year. ID Federation’s SignOn Once can simplify our lives as the industry grapples with multi-factor authentication. Working within the organization’s trust framework can reduce this burden if the industry gets behind it.
Win-Win Agents, companies and technology vendors can leverage and standardize data to identify leading indicators that can increase retention, reduce losses and generate new business—if we work together. That would be a win for the entire industry. More important, it would free agents up to spend more time helping customers. Data should never be an end in itself. I have always argued that relationships trump technology. It’s how we use the technology to help people that makes all the difference in the world.
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