Why Agency Management Systems Fail

Agency Management Systems have long struggled to add demonstrable value to or increase adoption within the brokerage community.

It is not uncommon for a brokerage to implement an Agency Management System and quickly discover that almost none of their employees are actually logging in and using it. Despite having evolved over time to include more features, Agency Management Systems themselves are incredibly difficult to use and don’t drive enough value for the end user. Engagement is therefore almost nonexistent. 

Further, most key parties that contribute to the success of a benefits program are not served by traditional Agency Management Systems. How can you attempt to solve broker workflows if you don’t allow them to collaborate with their clients or carriers on the system? Without client and carrier support in Agency Management Systems, all collaboration happens outside the system. What little engagement there might have been is therefore limited to only that small subset of work that can be done without any input from a third party. 

Ultimately, leaders of brokerages see enough value in Agency Management Systems to buy them. Still, users simply don’t get enough value out of it to leverage them to their full potential.

The Problem with Engagement

A software solution must fulfill two critical requirements in order to become valuable within an organization: 

1. It must be user-friendly. This point is fairly straightforward: if the software is not easy for the user to use, nobody will use it. Or, perhaps even worse, they will use it incorrectly and cause greater harm than good. In order to get value out of any software you provide to your team, make sure that it is intuitive and easy to use for the folks who will be using it.
2. It must be sticky. This point is a little more nuanced. When we say the software needs to be “sticky,” we mean the user needs to continue engaging with it on a regular basis.

There are a couple of ways to accomplish this:

The software adds value to the user - This is the best-case scenario: - if the technology actively benefits the person who is using it, they are much more likely to use it consistently without external reinforcement. Examples of this might be making a very arduous workflow less painful, or automating multiple steps of their day-to-day. 

Management incentivizes the use of the technology In the absence of value for the end user, the other, albeit less ideal way to create stickiness is with a top-down approach. For example, management might tie incentive compensation to the proper use of the technology. This creates more work for management, but it can be effective if properly reinforced.

To put it simply, effective technology solutions get users through the door and keep them there. This phenomenon is called engagement and it is the key to getting value out of technology.

Agency Management Systems have historically failed on both of these fronts. 

Typical Agency Management Systems provide a clunky and outdated user experience, which makes even the most tech savvy employees bang their heads against their desks in frustration. Not only are Agency Management Systems hard to use, but they ask the user to manually enter data over and over. Worse than menial, this is incredibly error prone and adds unnecessary risk to your business.

Further, there is typically no value provided to the end user. In other words, they have zero incentive to use the system on an ongoing basis. So they don’t. That means every dollar invested in the tool is ultimately wasted.

Siloed, Disparate Workflows

Almost every workflow in benefits is collaborative. Deploying successful benefits programs requires the brokerage to work effectively across external teams that may include carriers, HR teams, or third-party vendors. 

Today, most of that collaboration happens over email and phone. There is an enormous amount of back and forth that lives in Microsoft Outlook and Gmail. In fact, most client history and records are ultimately stored in these systems. Email providers are not workflow tools, however, and they do nothing to support or automate project management.

Enter Agency Management Systems. In theory, they are positioned to fill the workflow gaps that email providers don’t support. However, in practice, Agency Management Systems fall short in two critical areas:

1. They do not allow for collaboration with external teams, which we know is a critical component to running successful benefits programs. 
2. They require employees to duplicate their workflow. More to come on this below.

In the current state, brokerage teams continue to conduct the vast majority of their work in their inbox, and then record what they’ve done in their Agency Management System.  Yet the external teams with whom they must collaborate have no access to the tool, so any work that is done within the system cannot be shared with them. On the one hand, brokerages are buying Agency Management Systems with the promise that they will make teams more efficient, while on the other hand brokerage teams are doing twice the work to mirror their existing workflows within the tool. 

In order to get to baseline efficiency with an Agency Management System, the tool must integrate with existing workflows and allow for collaboration with external teams. From there, the tool can introduce automation and further efficiencies. But without these key components, brokerage teams become considerably less efficient and the Agency Management System ends up doing more harm than good.

If Agency Management Systems Aren't the Solution, What Is?

Stay tuned for our next blog post in the Agency Management System series to understand how you can solve your brokerage workflows while attracting and retaining a modern book of business.

Or, click here to get your copy of the full whitepaper "Why Agency Management Systems Fail" now.

Want to elevate your employee benefits experience? Schedule a demo of the PlanYear full-lifecycle benefits solution.