Flatten Your Onboarding with AgentSync Manage and Onboarding Portals

Are your producers tired of entering (and re-entering) their answers five different ways into slight variations of the Uniform Licensing Application every time they’re onboarding or applying for a new license or renewal?

If your response is “well, too bad, they have to if they want to be compliant,” at AgentSync, our license management software and custom onboarding processes would like to challenge that line of thinking.

Let’s pop the hood and see how AgentSync’s compliance and insurance producer management software suite can simplify life for you and your producers and stop you from submitting irregular applications to state DOIs.

The application formerly known as: Uniform Producer Licensing Application

State adoption of the Uniform Licensing Application for resident or nonresident licenses has been transformative across the industry, standardizing (for the most part) the information a producer needs to keep on hand to fill out the paperwork. 

Until recently, the application was officially known as the Uniform Producer Licensing Application, which caused a lot of confusion for entrants to the industry, since states use this application for not only insurance producer licensing and adjuster licensing, but also for licensing entities like third-party administrators and agencies. 

But recent changes have changed the application name to the Uniform Licensing Application, and reduced the amount of complexity and nuance of the questions, as well. To read more about the recent changes, check out our interview here.

Unfortunately, in many cases, each time a producer wants to apply for a license in a new state, they still have to fill out the application again and again and again. For some states, the experience has descended into checkbox hell, a process many producers have managed to offload onto their staff. This is where a multi-state licensing platform becomes invaluable.

Nonuniform questions on producer insurance applications

One of the myriad challenges of producer insurance applications even with a Uniform Licensing Application is that many states have nonuniform questions. Sometimes these questions are the exact same. But sometimes there’s a slight variation—think, “If you have ever been convicted of a crime…” vs. “If you have you been charged with a crime…” vs. “In the last 10 years, if you have you been convicted of a crime…” vs. “If you’ve never been charged with a crime…” 

Because so many states have these nonuniform questions, you can’t even rely on the steady gruntwork of copy/paste to get you through. You have to check that you flagged all the variations and answered them appropriately according to whatever flavor of the question is on that particular state’s app. And if your producer happens to have a criminal background, figuring out which states require what for reporting is its own struggle. This is where compliance automation software and producer vetting systems make a critical difference.

The consequences of manual application fills

Applications are less horrible than they used to be, but the state of things still means lots of repetitive data entry for nonresident license applications, and variations in a producer’s answers could result in the kind of inconsistencies that trigger yellow flags in state reviews. Yellow flags aren’t red flags—these inconsistencies don’t necessarily mean your producer’s application will be rejected. But they could slow down the state’s approval process as someone checks answers against the data for your producer housed at NIPR.

Traditional producer management platforms struggle with this challenge, but modern compliance workflow automation tools are designed to eliminate these pain points.

5 ways AgentSync helps

AgentSync’s flagship product, Manage, was built out of an effort to make managing producer compliance far easier, and nowhere is this effort more evident than in how it solves for variations in the Uniform Producer Licensing Application. This producer management platform represents the next generation of insurance operations platforms. Following are the top ways we can take the pain out of your producer license tracking:

No. 1: Flattened applications

If you want to end the chase for answers, AgentSync’s onboarding portal has flattened all state applications into a single source. Instead of sending a producer a stack of applications to fill out for the list of states in their sales region or filling them out on their behalf, our portal collects all answers in one streamlined place. This license application automation approach dramatically reduces producer friction and improves compliance outcomes.

No. 2: Producer answers are saved for renewals

Issues for producers often occur when their initial license application, nonresident application, and renewal applications are inconsistent. Yet these inconsistencies are often the result of simple forgetfulness as opposed to a nefarious plot. So what’s a producer to do?

AgentSync saves answers for producers so, at renewal time, their previous answers resurface and they can change anything that’s changed. But they don’t have to grasp at memories of past answers or exact phrasing. It’s the difference between filling out a whole new series of questions and paperwork vs. walking in and having someone ask, “has anything changed?”

This built-in producer data management system eliminates the need for manual record-keeping.

No. 3: System presents questions to agents based on resident license, agent type, and line of authority

States are different—it’s kind of a whole thing in insurance. With AgentSync, your producers get served the specific questions that matter to them based on their resident state license, their agent type, and their line of authority. Do they need a specific surplus lines license, or will a P&C license suffice? Does their resident life and health license translate for annuity sales in the nonresident state they want to apply in or will that be a different application? 

These variations commonly cause headaches for producers who are left to wonder whether they’re answering irrelevant questions or missing out on questions they need to address. But by baking state reciprocity rules into producer onboarding software and license verification systems, AgentSync can help you make the experience cleaner and more streamlined than ever before.

No. 4: An agency/carrier can specify the producer’s assignment to narrow or broaden the scope of questions

If your producers are limited to a Kansas-Nebraska sales territory, it doesn’t make sense to make them answer Florida questions. By assigning producers to a regional territory, you can limit the scope of their onboarding or license application questions to only those states (or lines of authority) that matter, further reducing the hassle and frustration for your producer partners. This level of distribution channel optimization is only possible with advanced producer appointment management capabilities.

No. 5: Instant fact-checking for producer data

AgentSync’s product suite flags inconsistent or inaccurate data so you can get to the bottom of those red-flag applications quickly and save yourself the cost of a license application or renewal if a producer is simply unable to meet the qualifications. By greenlighting in-good-order applications and flagging problematic apps, you can avoid wasting your staff time and keep your NIGO rates tidy. This compliance reporting tool and application quality assurance feature protects your E&O risk and strengthens regulatory compliance.

Moving from paper to digital to your next level

Just because you’ve transitioned off of paper applications doesn’t mean the hassle of paperwork for your producers has ended. Without a system that actively cuts down on the work and frustration for your producers (and your internal compliance and ops teams!), you’ve just moved from analog to digital, with few benefits. 

Onboarding and producer license applications are frequently an opportunity for dropped business and lost producers, even after a long and hard-won recruitment process. With AgentSync’s insurance operations platform, producer onboarding software can become an opportunity for your business to WOW producers and help them get the licenses they need. This compliance automation platform transforms how you engage with talent.

Transforming your onboarding and license applications is just the beginning.

Manage is also helping AgentSync clients get full visibility into their distribution channels and optimize their profitability with:

• Dashboards that provide high-level overviews and detailed compliance reports you can sort by state or sales territories
• Bulk transactions that allow you to apply licenses, appointments, or terminations in bulk to right-size your distribution channels in a given region
• Just-in-Time workflows that allow carriers to avoid paying for appointments for producers who never sell their products
• Hierarchy management that visualizes producer uplines and reflects distributor relationships in all of their glorious complexity
• Integrations that synchronize accurate data with other software, making your entire workspace more valuable and de-siloing vital data for background checks, producer-to-carrier contracting, commissions payments, and more

See what else Manage can do to make you operate at your next level. Schedule a demo with our team today, and get started on your future state.