Is Your Agency’s Reporting Making You Crazy?

How do you feel about running reports in your agency management system? Does it make you crazy? Or do you just stay away from it altogether because you know it’s inaccurate? Maybe it’s a combination of both. The reality is you cannot manage your agency by your bank account and P&L; you must lead and manage it by accurate reporting.

As the world turns and we grow even more reliant on technology, the accuracy of data in our management system has to be a continuous strategy in our agency. You can no longer stand for sloppy data as it will have multiple impacts in the future. One untold truth in the insurance space is that part of everyone’s job in the agency is to build a clear, clean and reliable database. We need to build databases of unsold customers, lost customers, and prospects. If we aren’t building a database, then marketing and communicating to customers and prospects becomes not only increasingly costly but also dangerous. Marketing inaccurately to bad data can make the agency look unprofessional. Many agencies know their data is not very good so they opt instead to just not use it. They work around it rather than fix the problem.

Recently, I was at a client’s office and he was so frustrated with data he wanted to go back to manual reporting on paper. Now my heart broke a bit since manual reporting may be slightly more accurate but not enough to account for the extra time. Not to mention pulling averages, stats and more is impossible. I challenged him and said, you are solving 10% of the problem by manual reporting. He challenged me back by asking me how he can run a business without accurate data. He was 100% right, you can’t run a business without accurate data. But the problem is that the data is living and breathing inaccurately inside your management system. A speaker I recently saw commented, “Garbage in, garbage grows.” The goal should be to hold the team accountable to following the right processes and procedures to obtain the right data for the rest of the time.

When you have accurate data you can do a whole slew of things that improve your business. You can lead and manage better, find opportunities for training, make smart business decisions, conduct precision marketing when your data is accurate. Using your management system as a lookup tool and a repository for notes means you aren’t even scratching the surface and you are paying far too much for a system.

When we work with clients to improve data integrity we always comment that there are only three places to look if the data is not on point:

1. Inaccurate reporting rules: Sometimes we miss a rule like excluding endorsements, making sure the date range is accurate, determining if you are counting new business by effective date or binder date. Either way, go back through the rules and check them. Then document the exact rule you are using. When you use the same measuring stick each time you will quickly see if there is an error!
2. Problem with the downloads: Every now and again a carrier downloads incorrectly. A download gets hung up or we just aren’t processing them correctly. Even with downloads, cleanup still needs to happen. For example, in rewrites, carriers download a cancellation and new business. The cancellation should have a status of rewrite and the new business should just be active or renewed. But we need a strong process that the team follows to make it work.
3. Inaccurate entry/process following by your team: Without a strong process manual everyone can do what they like. In addition to bad data it can often lead to inefficiency because there is no synergy in how people are working together. Finding documents, notes and more becomes more of a scavenger hunt than a seamless system. This also can negatively impact your client experience. Most people want more structure but getting everyone to adopt it takes time. You have to exert as much as you can on auditing and adopting new procedures.

Holding your team accountable to data is a bit of an obstacle course. We tell clients to expect and prevail over the datatude they may get. No one likes stepping on the scale just like no one likes seeing how much business was lost, but you have to do it. When the team can see their numbers accurately six months from now and see how they personally can improve, it all comes together. In the beginning you can expect frustration, a few arguments and people not believing the data. If there is a difference in opinion on reports give people 48 hours to review it and clean it up in your system. But don’t give up because your database is a very valuable tool. When we ignore it and work around sloppy data it just breeds. Take this year as the year of data integrity and by 2018 you will be elated you did!