How to Stop Wasting 20% of Your Day Searching for Information

How to Easily Find Information in Your Book of Business

Studies have revealed serious drains on time and resources when workers aren’t able to find and/or keep the necessary data at their fingertips.

McKinsey reported “employees spend 1.8 hours every day—9.3 hours per week, on average—searching and gathering information. Put another way, businesses hire 5 employees but only 4 show up to work; the fifth is off searching for answers, but not contributing any value.”

Interact found that “19.8 percent of business time – the equivalent of one day per working week – is wasted by employees searching for information to do their job effectively.”

When your data isn’t easily searchable or organized in a way that makes it easy for your employees to find data, life and health insurance agencies lose serious time and resources to the search.

There are two ways agencies need to be able to easily search their book of business: in reactive and proactive mode.

In reactive mode, something comes up or happens, so you do a quick search or an advanced search to find the answers. Maybe the agency owner has questions about new leads or recently-converted clients, so you do an advanced search on new leads within the last 30 days and/or new policies in the same timeframe.

In proactive mode, you identify the things that come up on a regular basis, either with your entire team or individually for yourself, and you create saved searches to monitor that data. Every day, you’ll see those saved searches on your dashboard.

Everyone understands the value of being able to quickly pull information in reactive scenarios, but what’s often overlooked is the value in keeping certain searches at the forefront of their day-to-day (proactive).

Identifying What Data to Monitor

When you’re able to pull data that you deal with often in a proactive way, it makes your day-to-day run smoothly. Think about things you ask a coworker often or things that regularly come up in meetings. 

Identifying those items and placing them on your agency management system (AMS) dashboard with tools like AgencyBloc’s Advanced & Saved Searches to see every day makes it easy to monitor that information.

Where reports are beneficial in seeing performance over a period of time, saved searches are excellent ways to monitor on a more granular scale—keep tabs, if you will.

To help you decide what to track, let’s cover several examples where agencies have used saved searches to proactively monitor important information at their agency.

Saved Search Examples for Insurance Agencies

1. Create and save a search of your groups and/or individuals based on their type and/or status. For instance, you could keep a list of your individual and/or group prospects to get a feel for your sales funnel.

2. Keep a rolling list of policies with renewals in the next 30-60 or even 90 days to stay on top of renewals.

3. See recent leads from a specific lead source to get a daily snapshot of your marketing efforts.

4. Keep a rolling list of policies of a certain carrier and/or coverage type.

5. Keep an eye on all pending policies, even by specific carrier or coverage type.

6. If you manage other agents, keep an ongoing list of agents with upcoming E&O or license renewal dates.

7. Track agents in a specific geographic location.

8. Track agents specializing in a certain carrier or coverage type.

9. Track recent agent recruits and new agents in your agency to help with your onboarding process.

These are just a handful of ways you could utilize saved searches on your dashboard. What else comes to mind when you consider these? How could people in different roles at your agency utilize this?

With AgencyBloc, everyone’s dashboards can be personalized to their needs, so everyone can create and save their own searches which will appear only on their dashboard.

The Benefits of Saved Searches

Depending on the scenario, there are times when you’ll be reactively searching for information, and there are times where it makes sense to proactively keep the data on your dashboard. If you’re housing your data in an industry-specific AMS like AgencyBloc, both are easy.

“Big data should be thought of as a process – how to get to new insights, how to turn them into action, resulting in business value.” —Gartner

Although the idea of saved searches might seem small, the value added is huge to any employee who doesn’t have to spend hours searching for the same information over and over. And the value added for the agency who employs these people is even larger.

So, with all of this in mind, think about:

• What questions come up on a regular basis from either my boss, a coworker, or myself?
• What data points in my book of business answer those questions?
• Do I have the tools in place to monitor these things on a daily basis?

This blog was originally published on July 31, 2018, and has been most recently updated and republished on March 16, 2021.

Posted by Kelsey Rosauer on Tuesday, March 16, 2021 in Insurance Agency Management System

1. data management
2. productivity