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 Producer Application every time they apply 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 Manage product and custom onboarding processes would like to challenge that line of thinking.

Let’s pop the hood and see how Manage can simplify life for you and your producers and stop you from submitting irregular applications to state departments of insurance (DOI).

The challenge: Uniform Producer Application

State adoption of the Uniform Producer 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.

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 many states, the experience has descended into checkbox hell, a process many producers have managed to offload onto their staff.

Nonuniform questions on producer insurance applications

One of the myriad challenges of producer insurance applications even with a Uniform Producer 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.

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.

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. Following are the top ways we can take the pain out of your producer licensing:

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.

No. 2: Reducing nonuniform question variations

States will likely always have their own flavors and variations in the form of nonuniform questions for the producer application. Many variations, however, are still full of double-work and confusion. Imagine questions such as “Are you a citizen?” “Are you a noncitizen?” or “Are you not a citizen?” Answering these questions and trying to keep your answer consistent with the changing phrasing so as not to answer dishonestly or confuse yourself can be difficult when you’ve been filling out paperwork – digitally or otherwise – for an hour.

AgentSync’s producer portal consolidates these kinds of questions when possible so as to minimize the amount of deja vu and disparate variations your producers encounter. This in turn increases the likelihood that your newly recruited producers will actually finish the process of onboarding and answering questions.

No. 3: 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?”

No. 4: 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 licensing applications and onboarding processes, AgentSync can help you make the experience cleaner and more streamlined than ever before.

No. 5: 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.

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, producer onboarding and license applications can become an opportunity for your business to WOW producers and help them get the licenses they need. 

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 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, commissions, 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.