Green Means Go: Ending the Stop-and-Go Traffic of Insurance Compliance Checks 

The beeping and honking. Blood pressure rising. Regardless of the fact that every traffic light you can see down the road is a bright shade of green, you realize that you still have to manually run from one green light to the next. 

Unfortunately, for your internal teams, manual producer compliance can feel a lot like that. A producer applies to be onboarded with your company and, most of the time, your team can tell whether it’s going to be a fit (green light), whether a producer isn’t right for your sales criteria (red light), or whether an application may require a bit more attention (yellow light). Regardless, your team likely has to run through the stops manually regardless of the color it adheres to. With a manual process, you have to handle every application as if it’s a yellow light, with a speed-up-then-slow-down approach.

Green light insurance producer onboarding applications

So, a producer applies to join your distribution channel. Great! Instant onboarding success!

Not so fast. Just because you know a producer will be green-lit doesn’t mean you can skip tasks like:

• Validating the producer’s national producer number (NPN) against state data
• Completing a background check
• Collecting a W-9 or W-4
• Verifying a current E&O policy

Frankly, even if those things all came through with the application, you’ll still need to run down a process of getting the producer properly contracted, ensuring the carrier’s appointment is made with the state, and filling in information across every one of your data systems. It’s like seeing that long row of green lights, and knowing you’ll still have to physically run from one light to the next. 

Red light insurance producer onboarding applications

Alternately, some data you know is a red light. The producer doesn’t have the appropriate license, they’re not writing in the line of business you concentrate on, they failed the background check, they’re in an oversaturated market, they don’t have the criteria you need. Still, you may have to run through a few steps of validation before you can fully verify that this is, in fact, a red-light situation, and this producer isn’t going anywhere with your organization.

Yellow light insurance producer onboarding applications

And then there are yellow lights.

These are applications that require actual attention. These are the ones where information might be missing, where an NPN is mistyped, where a name variation is causing confusion, or you need to hold the application for a hot minute while a producer catches up their E&O policy or a renewal deadline.

Yellow light applications are the kind where it may take some sorting to figure out whether it’s really a green for go or a red for stop. But these applications require more time and demand human attention.

Current state: It’s all yellow

Unfortunately, many agencies, carriers, MGAs, and MGUs are operating like a Coldplay song. As far as their processes are concerned, all applications are yellow. All of them.

Instead of being able to show that an application is in good order as soon as it’s submitted, your team still has to push the onboarding process with brute force, typing information across systems and proverbially sitting in traffic.

Consider what kind of time savings (and energy savings, and frustration savings…) your team could realize if applications submitted in good order were automatically validated against a source of truth and approved or rejected on their merits, no further action needed. Instead of having a queued backlog of unaddressed producer onboarding applications, you could devote your attention to unblocking applications with inconsistencies.

This is why more insurance businesses are enlisting AgentSync Manage or AgentSync Autopilot: By using producer compliance software that automates these processes, teams can re-allocate their attention to hyperfocus on the few applications that need human time and energy. 

Using producer compliance data to get more green lights

The reality is that carriers, agencies, and MGAs that use AgentSync can also get more green-light applications to begin with, By getting insight into what causes the holdups and traffic jams of your producer license verification or carrier appointment processes, you can then address those data points with a degree of certainty. 

AgentSync’s custom producer portals allow you to control the inflow of data you need while delivering a highly tailored agent experience. Not only can you ensure more producer onboarding applications come in clean, but you can better establish your reputation as being easy to work with and compliance-forward.

From streamlining your onboarding to correcting onboarding errors before they happen, adopting AgentSync as part of your compliance management infrastructure is like putting your growth on cruise-control. 

Help your internal compliance team stop the producer management road rage

Having a process that cuts onboarding from weeks to days will (obviously) wow your producer force, but leveraging compliance automation is also a huge gain for your internal compliance management team. Thorough compliance means hiring – and retaining! – employees who either have years of industry experience or who are willing to train for possibly years to become proficient in their work, and/or leveraging a legal team to constantly keep up with the state changes as they come down the pike. 

Unfortunately, there isn’t a hyperabundance of workers out there who fit the bill. Especially with personal fulfillment top of mind for many potential employees. How valued will someone feel stuck in a repeatable manual workflow for the foreseeable future? Checking applications for data errors isn’t something that delivers the kind of meaning and purpose that can retain employees in difficult jobs. Most teams right now are starting to think about how they can free up their team’s time to focus on mission critical items to accelerate the business forward. 

If all this talk of stop-and-go traffic has got you thinking about your producer force and other staff’s potential for road rage, see how AgentSync can speed things up and provide a freeway experience instead.