Property/casualty insurance carriers investing in technology to help agents haven’t yet made great strides in the minds of their agency partners, a late-2015 survey for Carrier Management reveals.
Executive Summary
Carriers putting money and resources into technology for agents aren't making much progress, according to a survey conducted by Deep Customer Connections and Wells Media's Insurance Journal for Carrier Management in late 2015.Asking agents to grade the value of carrier technology designed to help with four agency activities—prospecting, writing policies, servicing policies and supporting policyholders with claims—DCC reported almost a carbon copy of findings from an earlier survey in 2014. Part 1 of a four-part article series.For the second straight year, P/C insurance agents—across all age groups and specializations—say their relationships with carriers are more valuable than the technology that carriers put in place to help them.
In addition, viewing results from the latest Independent Agent Survey conducted by Deep Customer Connections against findings from a prior DCC report (published in 2015 from a late-2014 survey) reveals that independent agencies taking part in the latest survey viewed carrier technology for three of four key agency activities as being about the same or slightly worse than it was a year earlier. The one exception was technology for servicing policies, garnering higher “helpfulness” scores from smaller agencies (those with 75 employees or less) in the second year of the survey. These smaller firms, making up roughly 85 percent of respondents for both surveys, pushed up overall average grades gauging the value of carrier technology in completing policy-servicing activities (below, bottom left graph, left-most bars).
