SOUND INTERNET SOLUTIONS
By John Ashenhurst
Two vendors implement real-time inquiry transactions
Agents can now do carrier billing and claims inquiry out of their management systems into carrier Web sites--with one workflow and one presentation.
Agency CSRs often get calls from customers who are worried about their direct-billed account balances or the status of a claim. That usually means the CSR must promise to call the customer back, look up the customer and policy number in the management system, and then get on the phone to the carrier call center. On a good day--and provided the customer is available for the return call--the process might take 15 minutes.
Increasingly, CSRs are turning to carrier Web sites for direct bill balance and claim status information. Though that process is faster, perhaps five instead of 15 minutes, it's still too long to keep the customer on the line--with phone tag often the result. And in any case, using carrier sites means managing a number of sign-on and password codes as well as understanding the vagaries of many different carrier Web sites. It's just too messy.
What would make more sense would be to handle the customer immediately--with no call back ever necessary. And that would be possible if the CSR's management system provided some sort of automated link between the customer policy or account balance screen and the appropriate carrier Web site screen. That's the idea behind hybrid interface. It's a way to use the current context (customer, policy, operation) of the management system to cue the carrier Web site to retrieve and display appropriate information. In the best case, a single click in the management system would automatically sign on to the carrier site, bring back the right information, and then display it in a single, cross-carrier standard format. All of that could be accomplished in 30 seconds, a short enough time to hold the customer on the line to complete the request.
After years of frustration, we've finally turned a corner. Agents can now do carrier billing and claims inquiry out of their management systems into carrier Web sites--with one workflow and one presentation.
Though I've described how inquiry requests could work, one can imagine quoting, new business, policy change and other common agency service transactions working the same way. In those cases the context would include not just customer, policy number, and operation type but application/policy detail as well.
Utopian versus practical
A year ago, I laid out the case for hybrid interface in these pages and elsewhere. I pointed out that carriers would continue to create and improve their agency portals and no amount of complaints would make them go away. Further, carriers were not motivated and perhaps couldn't even afford to create another set of agency-directed technology intended to interact with agency management systems. Therefore, the idea was to find some way for management systems to make use of carrier Web sites--without carriers having to do anything.
Hybrid interface isn't utopian; it's practical. It isn't about some imaginary, future ideal world in which all carriers do exactly as agents say. Hybrid interface is an opportunistic strategy for recognizing the world as it is and trying to realize the greatest possible benefit for agents--with little investment on anyone's part.
It's actually happening right now
As a matter of fact, agents are beginning to vote with their mouse clicks. Hundreds of agents are doing thousands of hybrid interface inquiry transactions daily against 10 different carrier Web sites. My guess is that by this time next year, thousands of agents will be doing hundreds of thousands of inquiry, new business, and policy change hybrid interface transactions. All those agencies will be saving a great deal of time and providing their customers more responsive service.
This past March, ebix and AMS Services each announced management system/carrier Web site inquiry support. The ebix unified direct bill service allows agents to get direct bill status information (currently with 10 carriers) via a single password and workflow. The service is available through ebixASP--and interestingly as a stand-alone service as well. The AMS TransactNOW service includes both billing and claims inquiry (currently with eight carriers) and works with Prime, AfW, and Sagitta. AMS is in the process of adding more carriers and working with its user group to decide which transaction types to add next.
Counterpoint
But do these examples of hybrid interface inquiry transactions really mean very much? Aren't they misleading and beside the point? It's always easy to create some small experiment--but will it generalize? Will it scale?
So far, ebix and AMS have recruited only a handful of companies. Will others follow? And how many carriers really have well-developed agency portals that can be exploited? What about other transaction types? It's child's play to do billing and claims inquiry. Very little data is required and there can't possibly be much variation carrier to carrier. But that's not going to be the case with new business submission. And policy change may not even be possible because few carrier sites and systems can handle it real time; it's an overnight batch process. Further, though personal lines and perhaps small commercial may offer some possibilities, carriers have done next to nothing on their Web sites for medium and large commercial lines.
And what about comparative quoting? How would that work with hybrid interface? Would it mean linking to multiple carrier Web sites in succession? Maybe it wouldn't be necessary to re-key the same data over and over--but what about carrier-by-carrier exceptions? And though the quotes that came back might be accurate to the penny, it would take forever to do one carrier, then another and then compare results manually. Why is that a good thing?
But let's assume all the carriers had Web sites that hybrid interface could use and that those sites supported all lines and all transaction types--and further that it was possible to aggregate quoting sessions automatically into one presentation and thus have usable comparative quoting. Even with all these improbable "ifs" coming true (or perhaps because of their coming true), you're left with an unsustainable enterprise. It will collapse of its own weight.
Why? It won't be possible to keep up with all the changes that carriers make to their Web sites but have no obligation to report to whoever maintains the hybrid interface servers that link management systems and carrier Web sites. The hybrid interface process will simply break down. Hybrid interface is easy and it's tempting, but it's really a slippery slope to interface hell. That's why the more sober and realistic in the industry have eschewed opportunistic approaches and insisted on some kind of standard agency/carrier connectivity.
Rebuttal
The objections to the viability of hybrid interface I've raised are real and non-trivial. Though carriers are enthusiastically creating and improving agency portals, it's fantasy to think that all carriers will have all lines and all transactions any time soon. So hybrid interface won't be perfect. On the other hand, it's absolutely certain that more carriers will deploy more lines and transactions in their portals. In the hybrid interface case, carriers don't have to do anything different from what they're already doing.
Will it be possible to create hybrid interface comparative rating? That's a really interesting question. One can imagine rating vendors retaining their current user interfaces but going to carrier Web sites in the background when that's possible and using local, vendor-created rate tables when it isn't--thus providing a kind of hybrid comparative rating. Over time, rating vendors would make increasing use of carrier Web sites but the agency user wouldn't have to worry about it. The rating vendor would manage the transition. Today, rating vendors add value by turning carrier rating manuals into computer tables and code and fitting them into a common front end. Perhaps in the future, a rating vendor value-added will be the management of connections to carrier sites and aggregated presentation through a very useful and productive front end.
Would hybrid interface, if successful, collapse of its own weight? Probably not--but wouldn't it be something if this form of real-time interface were so successful that it became a concern? It certainly makes no sense to forgo a promising and practical solution just because it might be loved to death. If hybrid interface does prove itself, the right kind of economic forces will be brought into play to deal with problems of scale.
Next steps
Two vendors and a handful of carriers have stuck their collective toes into the hybrid interface water. Now we have to see whether it really works as advertised and whether agents adopt it. I think it will and they will. What comes next? That's up to the vendors and what their agency customers ask for. My guess is that near-term focus will be on service rather than new business activity.
Chris Garson, Business IT Director at Progressive Insurance, thinks that the hybrid interface is likely to become very popular in short order; and the industry could do well to think through the implications and optimize the transition. For instance, Garson believes that ACORD should extend its standards to include the URL location of policy, billing, claims, and document information. That would significantly improve the efficiency of agency system/carrier Web site linking. Cross-carrier ID and password synchronization is another area that ACORD could profitably turn its attention to.
Garson points to a number of other areas that agents, carriers, and vendors should focus on including clearing up the issues related to moving data back and forth between agency and carrier systems, protecting agency data against download overlay, the download and retention of company-specific information, tracking the owner of every transaction, and storing and using customer e-mail addresses.
Garson also sees some significant opportunities to extend workflow thinking outside the boundary of the agency and include the carrier as well. For instance, carrier-to-agency
e-mail should find its way into the right customer/policy in the agency management system. The same is true of any notes entered into the carrier Web site. Today, agencies often re-key carrier initiated messages. That's a waste of time and should be unnecessary. The same goes for underwriting reports ordered through the carrier Web site. They should automatically find their way back into the agency database. Garson's point, and it is a very important one, is that for the last 20 years interface questions have been very narrowly focused--mostly on what's contained in ACORD forms and policy dec sheets. That narrow focus has ignored the much broader information interchange and interdependency between carriers and agents--and thus a great deal of unnecessary duplication of effort persists.
Finally...
I've watched and often decried the direction and ineffectiveness of the interface effort over the last 20 years. For all the money and time spent, it's fallen far short of what agents have been told to expect. But the convergence of the Internet, carrier Web sites, and open management systems with AL3 and XML export, makes it possible to finally deliver what agents have needed and wanted all along--with very modest additional effort. I hesitate to say that I'm finally excited at the prospect of real, widespread interface, but I am. *
The author
John Ashenhurst publishes Sounding Line, an electronic newsletter focused on insurance technology. For more information, see www.soundingline.com. He can be reached at johnashenhurst@
soundingline.com or (360) 376-1090.