Summary:

In this episode of The Digital Broker, Steve and Ryan talk about goals and strategic planning. By listening to this episode, you will learn:

• What kinds of goals insurance agencies typically set for themselves
• Why goals break down in the absence of strategic planning
• How strategic planning works and how it helps you achieve your goals, even in the face of unexpected change

The Digital Broker podcast is brought to you buy Indio Technologies. Indio turns the application and renewal process into an online TurboTax like experience for your clients. As a result, the 1,000+ agents using Indio provide their clients with a top-rated customer experience, reduce their E&O exposure, and outgrow their competition. To learn more about Indio, click here!

Recap:

Are you familiar with the following scenario? You’re in an all-hands meeting to discuss the future of the agency: how are you going to grow revenue, cut losses, overhaul certain routines and make space for new ones? Your employees are sharing ideas, setting benchmarks for themselves. Goals are emerging. You commit the agency to achieve some of them within three to five years. Everybody’s on board. They leave the meeting feeling good about themselves and their work.

Come to the end of the fiscal year, it’s like the meeting never even happened. You’re no closer to achieving your goals than you were before the meeting started. Why? Everybody seemed so excited and sincere!

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Summary:

In this episode of The Digital Broker, Steve and Ryan talk to tech entrepreneur Duke Williams about chatbot technology and how it applies to insurance operations. By listening to this episode, you will learn:

• How chatbots basically work and why they’re useful inside an agency
• Why some chatbots are popular and others aren’t
• Where a chatbot does and doesn’t threaten an agent’s job

The Digital Broker podcast is brought to you buy Indio Technologies. Indio turns the application and renewal process into an online TurboTax like experience for your clients. As a result, the 1,000+ agents using Indio provide their clients with a top-rated customer experience, reduce their E&O exposure, and outgrow their competition. To learn more about Indio, click here!

Recap:

Duke has found that many agents and brokers misunderstand or underestimate what a chatbot is and what it can do. It isn’t simply a widget that resembles a conversation between computer and user. Fundamentally, a chatbot is an A.I., rules-based conversation within a specific context. (5:57)

Despite the strides in A.I. technology, most chatbots are pretty simple creatures—Duke likens them to four-year-old children, but even that might be overstating it. Four-year-old children can think independently and generate new ideas. A chatbot is limited by what a human tells it to think and how.

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Summary:

In this episode of The Digital Broker, Steve and Ryan talk with Eric Wistrand, IT Director at the Couch Braunsdorf Insurance Group, and learn how his agency successfully implemented an electronic payment solution. By listening to this episode, you will learn:

• How the order-to-cash cycle is riddled with failure points, what they are, and how they affect different payment methods
• What your options are to mitigate or eliminate those failure points, and what to look for when evaluating those options
• What the payment process looks like when it is optimized, and how it saves your agency time and money

The Digital Broker podcast is brought to you buy Indio Technologies. Indio turns the application and renewal process into an online TurboTax like experience for your clients. As a result, the 1,000+ agents using Indio provide their clients with a top-rated customer experience, reduce their E&O exposure, and outgrow their competition. To learn more about Indio, click here!

Recap:

Clients are still in the habit of paying an insurance agency by check, but take a look at everything that has to happen for that check to clear. (9:20) The check has to arrive in the mail. Someone has to break it open, time-stamp it, and reroute it to the accounting department, assuming an account manager doesn’t have to get involved first. Someone in accounting then tags the check to the client’s file before sending the check out to be deposited. This is typically a batched process—checks accumulate until a batch is deposited all at once, prolonging the clearance of the funds further.

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Summary:

This episode was originally recorded on December 27th, 2018.

In this episode of The Digital Broker, Steve and Ryan talk to Adam Bratt, co-founder of Indio Technologies, to learn more about how Indio is already helping agents and brokers and will continue to do so by introducing new features. By listening to this episode, you will learn:

• A bit about Adam’s background and how Indio got started
• How Indio’s existing features help the insurance industry as a whole, saving agents and brokers time, keeping clients happy, and directing more business to carriers
• How Indio plans on stimulating even more operational excellence by introducing new business intelligence features
• How insurance agencies at large are dealing with pressure to keep up with data technology, where they have made progress, and where there’s still work to be done

The Digital Broker podcast is brought to you buy Indio Technologies. Indio turns the application and renewal process into an online TurboTax like experience for your clients. As a result, the 1,000+ agents using Indio provide their clients with a top-rated customer experience, reduce their E&O exposure, and outgrow their competition. To learn more about Indio, click here!

Recap:

Indio has been The Digital Broker’s sponsor since the podcast’s inception, and we’ve talked about the product when we thought it was appropriate, but many of our listeners are still curious: how does Indio help agents and brokers do their jobs better?

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Summary:

On this episode of The Digital Broker, Steve and Ryan are joined by Duke Williams, founder of Simply Easier Payments, to discuss how electronic payments remain a challenge for many agencies, and how they can overcome those challenges to provide an experience their customers desire. By listening to this episode, you will learn:

• How widespread electronic payments have become
• Why so many agencies still refuse to accept them due to several regulatory and financial challenges
• How Simply Easier Payments contends with each of those challenges to let agencies accept electronic payments legally, securely, and at no loss to the bottom line

The Digital Broker podcast is brought to you buy Indio Technologies. Indio turns the application and renewal process into an online TurboTax like experience for your clients. As a result, the 1,000+ agents using Indio provide their clients with a top-rated customer experience, reduce their E&O exposure, and outgrow their competition. To learn more about Indio, click here!

Recap:

A payments crisis is affecting insurance agencies. When they do have to take a payment from the insured, many agencies agree to take a check and not much else. Twenty years ago, this was perhaps tenable. Today, it’s a different story. Customers demand to pay electronically, and every other industry in the world is obliging them—except ours. Why?

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