Insurance agencies often have to deal with manual processes and paperwork to manage information about their customers. An example is downloading data from a carrier and updating their agency management system (AMS). It is common for some of the data from the carrier not to match up to the AMS. This then requires an agent to manually match up the policy download to the policy in their AMS. Sometimes a policy update may be missed. As client data increases or more carriers are added, the amount of manual work can become excessive.
Agencies must consider how to use technology to manage larger volumes of data and bring together disparate systems to automate their manual repetitive tasks with greater update frequencies.
A Policy download is the process of bringing policy-related information and transaction details from insurance carriers into an agency’s AMS. Insurance policies undergo endorsements from time to time and these policy changes must be reflected in the agency’s AMS.
Sometimes, the downloads from the carrier do not match up with policies in an agency’s AMS. This results in the policy going into suspense. When this happens, an agent has to physically go in and match up the policy download to the policy in their AMS, and that takes time and resources.
When downloads do not match the data in the AMS, the downloads become unusable data in the agency’s AMS. This data can have a negative effect on reporting. Failed downloads also result in agencies not having the most up-to-date policy information and so insurance agents are not able to provide the best possible client service and customer experience as they aren’t operating on the most current information.
Many carriers now provide their data in the industry-standard AL3 format, which needs to be converted into XML or text format for the AMS to handle. This presents several problems for agencies:
Getting policies from multiple carriers has its challenges. One option is to contact each carrier (e.g., via FTP from the carrier server to the agency’s server) to download policy transactions. Again, this is often a process that requires staff intervention as well as knowledge of what needs to be done.
As the volume of data from different systems grows, it becomes an increasingly time-consuming and labor-intensive effort to manually perform these operations.
The use of data integration to automate the policy download and matching process can bring several benefits to an agency:
Synatic is a Data Integration Hub (DIH) offering a single platform that can collect download data from multiple carriers and perform the required conversions to allow the download to sync with an agency’s AMS. It supports batch and real-time processes so that different business scenarios can be accommodated.
With Synatic’s powerful error detection capability, errors and duplicates can be removed during the download and matching process. This ensures that the data in the agency’s AMS is clean and accurate.
The Synatic DIH enables insurance agencies to bring together disparate systems and data sources to automate the steps of the policy download and matching process, allowing agents to focus on more value-adding work. It gives agencies access to the correct, up-to-date better information they need quickly without requiring manual intervention. It can also scale seamlessly to handle greater volumes of data.
Making use of the Synatic DIH can significantly reduce the amount of time and resources that agents spend manually dealing with policy downloads. If you want to ensure consistency between carrier downloads and your AMS, contact Synatic today.
