Data is the rich and growing renewable resource of the digital age. And the best part is, you don’t have to head west to find it. Within your management system, there’s an enormous amount of valuable data related to your customers, insurers, and team waiting to be unearthed. Like mining for gold, though, data requires the right tools to extract its value.
Historically, the norm for most brokerages has been to turn their raw data into static reports. The problem with tabular reports created in Excel, for example, is they are rigid and offer only a point-in-time snapshot of desired business metrics. To turn this static data into business intelligence that can inform decision-making across the brokerage requires tedious, manual analysis that makes it challenging to scale on a frequent basis.
In contrast, interactive data analysis tools make extracting intelligence about your business faster and easier. They analyze the raw data for you, displaying multiple levels of insight via data visualizations you can explore to answer questions about how the business is performing, how teams are operating, and where you need to focus time and energy.
Interactive vs. Static Data Analysis
Click into one of the seven roles below for more details on the problems each person is trying to solve and how data can help.
Unlocking the Data Goldmine for Every Insurance Brokerage Role
2. Collect and organize relevant data.
Once you know what problem you’re trying to solve, it’s time to gather all data you need to find those answers. Because there are multiple data sources, you need to build a central data repository to serve as a single place where internal and external data can be organized, integrated, engineered, and modeled.
3. Cleanse and standardize data.
You’ve collected and combined data from multiple sources. Now it’s time for you to “clean” and filter it. Think of this process as organizing and tidying up the data, removing what is no longer needed, replacing what is missing, and standardizing the format across all the data collected.
4. Analyze and interpret data to inform decision-making.
After the data is collected and cleansed, it is ready for analysis. Data analysis is the process of using statistical techniques to examine the data and extract useful information.
5. Use visualization tools to communicate insights.
You’ve distilled your data into insights, but it may be hard for key stakeholders to digest it in its raw form. Creating visuals can help tell the story of your data in a way that everyone can understand.
6. Improve processes.
Data analytics is an ongoing endeavor; it doesn’t end once the initial pain point is resolved. You should develop ways to measure accountability, effectiveness and efficacy, and constantly compare the operation with desired outcomes, making adjustments as needed.
7. Build a data-driven culture.
To be truly data-driven, you must build a culture where everyone uses data to make decisions. This includes training employees on how to use data analytics and giving them access to the tools they need. It also involves creating a culture of accountability in which everyone is responsible for using data to make better decisions.
Ready to turn your data into goldmine-worthy insights?
Read our Unearth the Power of Data Analytics eBook for steps on how to make business intelligence work at your agency and tech recommendations to become more data-driven.
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While business intelligence solutions have historically focused on areas of interest to brokerage leaders, these applications have evolved to provide value to other individual employees. Across all stages of the insurance lifecycle, vital information for specific job roles can be presented in easy-to-understand visual formats so more of your team can double-click into what’s happening with their business, teams, and/or workflows to grow revenue, improve efficiency, and positively impact the customer experience.
Giving More Brokerage Staff Access to Business Intelligence
Sales Manager
Brokerage Principal
Department Manager
IT/Operations Specialist
Finance Manager/VP/CFO
Producer
Servicing Representative
Brokerage Principal
My responsibilities: I am responsible to myself and the equity owners in the business to ensure continued, predictable, and successful business performance. This includes forecasting, measuring, and managing all aspects of the business and finding strategic ways to thrive and have as much organic growth as possible.
What I need insight into: I need to quickly access a breadth of data to understand the overall health of my brokerage, sales pipeline, financial performance, and the most profitable insurer relationships.
My responsibilities: As a department leader, I maintain a smaller client book of business while managing peers in their respective departments (Personal Lines, Commercial Lines, and Benefits).
What I need insight into: I need to understand my team’s workload so I can determine where to focus resources for maximum productivity and profitability.
Department Manager
My responsibilities: I lead the sales team in their efforts for account retention and lead conversion. I’m focused on building strong insurer relationships and staying abreast of market conditions. Ultimately, I’m accountable to brokerage management for the success of overall sales goals.
What I need insight into: I need to understand revenue growth, profitability, and progress across my sales team through health and pipeline for existing policies and new opportunities.
Sales Manager
My responsibilities: I’m responsible for everyday insurance accounting activities, including handling producer commissions, bank statement reconciliations, accounts receivables, general ledger, month-end processes, and running financials.
What I need insight into: I need financial business intelligence for managing cash flow, controlling data quality that impacts accounting workflows, and understanding business performance.
Finance Manager/VP/CFO
My responsibilities: I’m focused on converting leads into customers. Often, on the go, I spend a lot of time building relationships with customers.
What I need insight into: I need to keep an eye on customer relationships and focus on tasks that drive sales with a breakdown of revenue composition and key activities across our book of business.
Producer
My responsibilities: I work with account managers to handle common account servicing tasks such as certificates, ID cards, etc.
What I need insight into: I need to be able to quickly prioritize where to focus my time with insights around activities, policies, and attachments.
Servicing Representitve
My responsibilities: I provide research and direction for IT innovation, performance, and reliability, leveraging IT specialties and competencies to ensure operational processes, efficiency, and employee satisfaction.
What I need insight into: I need to efficiently monitor user logins, security changes, and data integrity to meet organizational compliance standards, audit security permissions, and spot trends in data quality throughout the brokerage.
IT/Operations Specialist
Data visualizations can help me:
Keep a pulse on the overall health of my brokerages, branches, and departments through growth, profitability, and retention reporting across clients, policies, and lines.
View sales and opportunity highlights like customer revenue breakdowns, won/lost opportunities, and performance across producers, departments, and branches.
Answer key questions about my insurers quickly, like who my preferred ones are based on premium, which ones are writing new/renewal/rewrites, and what an insurer’s hit rate is for my brokerage.
Data visualizations can help me:
Keep a pulse on the overall health of my team's book of business, customer retention and expiring policies.
Understand my team’s productivity and capacity by looking at work effort and overdue activities.
Review book and retention rankings by employee to ensure work is balanced and brokerage goals are on track.
Data visualizations can help me:
Maintain visibility into the health of my sales team through customer mix and retention breakdowns, as well as growth areas across business lines and policies.
Explore revenue breakdowns across the team, including average and trending revenue by customer.
View recent wins and near-term opportunities based on the probability of closing for my team.
Data visualizations can help me:
Maintain appropriate cash positions with visibility into cash flow in and out of our brokerage across transactions like incoming client payments, outgoing insurer payments, and expenses.
Ensure the accuracy of accounting entries and avoid posting incorrect financials with insights across general ledger entries, commissions, account balances, and transactions.
Easily understand and report to leadership the health and performance of the business with revenue breakdowns by insurers and producers, expense trends, and more.
Data visualizations can help me:
Maintain visibility into upcoming and new business activities across my opportunities.
Easily view my largest customers and highest value industries based on revenue, including how those rankings trend over time.
Understand the health of my pipeline with insight into progress toward my goal and opportunities based on their probability to close.
Data visualizations can help me:
Prioritize my tasks for the day, focusing on upcoming and overdue activities.
Prioritize renewal tasks with insight into upcoming expiring policies.
Determine which documents need to be associated with my accounts with a view of the number of unrouted attachments.
Data visualizations can help me:
Gain insight into user logins to quickly determine who may be having problems, how often users log in, and when logins occur.
Easily audit and maintain visibility into when and who changes security settings and provide visibility into what user profiles are changed, when, and by whom.
Control data quality for the business with insight into platform and field utilization across users.