While agencies need data insights to gain visibility into how their business is performing, accessing that data hasn’t always been easy. Staff had to sift through inconsequential data and try to interpret insights that had no meaning to their role. Ultimately, the time and effort spent sorting data often outweighed the advantages gained from the insights.
But there’s good news: Data visualization tools have evolved to allow users to see only what data is relevant to their role. Employees with access to data visualization tools can easily find answers to common questions without running and preparing multiple disparate reports, saving them time and allowing answers to be shared more quickly. Team members in nearly every agency role can benefit from insights ranging from employee productivity to cross-selling opportunities to revenue breakdowns.
Let’s take a deeper look at how data insights can enhance daily work from the perspective of each agency role.
View From the Top
Let’s start at the top with owners and principals. Keeping an agency running smoothly requires a bird's-eye view of the business. Data visualization tools make data regarding growth, profitability, and retention from across the business easily accessible in a single location, helping owners better track the health of their agency. This information can be further broken down to understand how individual branches and departments are performing.
To fully understand the health of the agency, it’s important to have a firm grasp on its sales pipeline and financial performance. Digging into sales and opportunity highlights such as customer revenue breakdowns, won/lost opportunities, and performance across producers, departments, and branches can provide valuable insights that guide future decisions and help course-correct any emerging issues.
Data insights can even help owners understand their agency’s carrier relationships. Owners can quickly answer key questions about their carriers, including who their preferred carriers are based on premium, which carriers are writing new/renewal/rewrites, and what a carrier’s hit rate is for their agency.
Managing With Data Insights
There are many different types of managers within an agency, all of whom can benefit from data insights. Let’s start with department managers, who can gain a line of sight into the workload and business managed by their team across clients, policies, and lines of business. Customer retention and expiring policy information provide valuable insight into the health of the team’s book of business and help ensure the agency’s goals are on track. Department managers can understand the productivity and capacity of their team by looking at work effort and overdue activities. They can even balance workloads across employees by reviewing book and retention rankings of individual employees and correcting any lopsidedness.
Next are sales managers. Much like owners and principals, sales managers can dig into sales pipeline data, such as recent wins and near-term opportunities, to understand how their team is performing. Sales managers may wish to dig deeper than an owner, looking at things like customer mix and retention breakdowns, and growth areas across business lines and policies. Data insights also allow the sales manager to understand revenue growth, profitability, and progress across their team, as well as revenue breakdowns such as average and trending revenue by customer.
An Account of the Accounting Department
Speaking of revenue, let’s move on to the accounting department. Accountants with access to data insights can easily manage cash flow, control data quality that affects accounting workflows, and understand financial performance. It becomes easier for the team to maintain appropriate cash positions when they have visibility into cash flow in and out of the agency with near-real-time transaction information like incoming client payments, outgoing carrier payments, and expenses. They can even ensure the accuracy of accounting entries and avoid posting incorrect financials with insights across general ledger entries, commissions, account balances, and transactions.
With all of this information, the accounting department can easily understand and report to leadership the health and performance of the business, including revenue breakdowns by carriers and producers, profits and losses, expense trends, and more.
Data Insights for Client-Facing Roles
Without clients, there is no agency. It only makes sense that an agency would provide their client-facing team members with data insights that can enhance their performance. Account managers and service reps, for example, can use data insights to easily understand where to focus their time each day. Having an in-depth view of coming and overdue activities in the agency management system can help prioritize each day’s tasks. This is particularly helpful when it comes to renewals. Being able to easily view expiring policies enables the team to focus on the most urgent renewal tasks.
Insights into revenue composition and key activities across an agency’s book of business allow its producers to keep a pulse on customer relationships and stay focused on tasks that drive sales. Visibility into the agency’s largest customers and highest-value industries based on revenue, including how those rankings trend over time, can help producers determine where their best opportunities lie. This information, combined with the ability to monitor coming and new business activities across all opportunities, allows producers to understand the health of their pipeline and get an accurate look at how the team is progressing toward its goals.
Informing the Information Technology Team
Last but definitely not least is the IT team. These team members play an important role in keeping everyone else’s systems up and running, so it is crucial that IT administrators have as many tools at their disposal as possible. Data visualization tools allow the IT team to gain insight into user logins to quickly determine who may be having problems logging into their software, how often users log in, and when logins occur.
With the constant threat of security breaches and cyber events, IT teams are under more pressure than ever to keep their agencies safe. Visualization tools help monitor software logins, security changes, and data integrity more efficiently to meet organizational compliance standards, audit security permissions, and spot trends in data quality throughout the agency.
Data Insights Are for Everyone
Giving all roles at an agency access to data visualization tools will allow them to double-click into what’s happening with their business, teams, and workflows. This enhanced visibility will enable the team to grow revenue, improve efficiency, and improve the customer experience.
