Author: Nag Rao

Our Strategy with EZLynx Connect

Posted on by Nag Rao

A Note from the CEO

I am sure by now many of you have heard of EZLynx Connect®. I thought this would be a good time to explain what EZLynx Connect is, and isn’t, as we shift our focus towards 2021.

EZLynx started as a single product solution back in 2005. Over the years, with the addition of several products, we have become the EZLynx One Platform®. This was by design and the result of a vision we laid out about five years ago. Agents can now come to EZLynx and get basically every feature and functionality necessary to run their business. Simply put, we are a one-stop shop for all your agency technology needs.

Outside EZLynx, the world is changing too. We listen carefully to our customers in an effort to fit our products to their needs. Sometimes, we get requests to build various niche solutions in EZLynx that, if developed up to our standards, could sometimes take focus away from development of our core products. Some of these solutions are already available from third-party vendors, however, and increasingly more of you are asking for integrations with these vendors in the platform. It quickly became obvious to us that we needed to create an eco-system in which vendors could seamlessly integrate their products and services with EZLynx to better meet your needs.

EZLynx Connect is the solution. We officially announced EZLynx Connect at our AgentLynx User Conference in 2019. It’s a new way to enable third-party vendors to build an integration on their own without much help from us. This streamlines the process, allowing faster development, and it empowers our customers to directly ask vendors they like to integrate with the EZLynx platform. EZLynx has a long history as an innovative company with leading-edge products; not surprisingly, we are the first to offer this kind of vision in our industry. This is not a radical or innovative idea, however, as it has been implemented in several popular platforms, such as Salesforce.

EZLynx Connect is both a technical architecture and a business platform. Using the EZLynx Connect APIs, third-party vendors can leverage our distribution potential to offer their products and services to more than 20,000 agents who use EZLynx every day. Everyone benefits. Integrations available today in EZLynx Connect include life insurance products, VoIP (internet telephony) services, credit card processing, and more. We have several other third-party integrations in development to be released in the next few quarters. Keep checking our monthly NewsLynx email to stay up to date.

Our goal is to make sure our customers have access to many of the best solutions available in the market to run their agencies. EZLynx Connect will help you sell more products, communicate with your customers more effectively, and service them more efficiently. It is our hope this will benefit both agency top and bottom-line numbers. As an agent, you will be able to review all the vendors available in our Connect Marketplace and select integrations you want to enable for your agency or users. EZLynx’s legal and security teams review Connect vendors who receive sensitive consumer information to give you additional peace of mind. Some vendors may require you to agree to separate legal contracts or terms of service and pay the stated license fees before the integration will be enabled, and additional terms may apply as provided in the legal terms portal on our website.

Our focus for 2021 is all about Connect. We will continue to add more and more vendors to the Connect Marketplace, and some of these integrations will allow you to sell additional insurance products, like pet insurance, auto warranty, and much more, while other integrations will help you automate your communication to the customers by email, phone, or text. I am confident this should excite you, the EZLynx user, because we are thrilled with the possibilities in the years ahead.

Please visit the EZLynx Connect page on our website to browse all vendors available today, or add a vendor integration to your agency through our Connect Marketplace page inside EZLynx. Please send any thoughts or feedback you might have to us. As I said at the start, we value you and will thoughtfully consider your feedback.

You can watch Nag Rao discuss EZLynx Connect in our November Episode of EZLynx Live here.

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EZLynx and Third-Party Data Exchange Services

Posted on by Nag Rao

A Note from the CEO

We have received much feedback from our customers over the past several months on whether, and to what extent, EZLynx will integrate with various third-party services beyond our current integrations. I understand why our customers are frustrated with the slow progress on this front. I felt it was my personal responsibility to explain why we have moved cautiously thus far and elaborate on some of the implications for EZLynx and our agents when integrating with services like these.

I want to make it clear up front that EZLynx considers any data input into our product as belonging to the agency that put it there, and they have full rights over this data with appropriate permissions from the consumer. They can request a complete data backup for a small fee any time, for any reason. We are simply custodians of this data, and we take this responsibility very seriously. By extension, you are also a custodian of the data of each consumer that you do business with. While you have entrusted us with storing and securing that data, your consumers have likewise entrusted you with their data, oblivious to your relationship with us or any other vendor. As consumers, we all tend to believe that we ultimately own our own data, regardless of whether it is being stored on Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, or even EZLynx.

EZLynx is a big proponent of industry standards for the purposes of third-party systems being able to talk to each other. This makes an agent’s life much easier. But we also realize how sensitive some of the data that our agents collect from their customers is, and this data gets stored in our system. This information includes personally identifiable information (PII) for all drivers, family members, and commercial contacts of the applicant, credit scoring information, personal information like financial assets owned to include schedules for jewelry, watches and other valuable items, home security details, and driving incidents, including DUI information. The list goes on and on.

I have no doubt in my mind that when a consumer shares their personal information with an insurance agent, they did not agree to, nor was it their intention, that the agent would turn around and make that information available to a variety of third-party services, some of which are not even part of the insurance industry, and many of whom are not even based in the United States. It is quite possible, even very likely, for this kind of information to fall into the wrong hands. In this age of data breaches and ransomware, I am sure you can imagine countless ways in which a bad actor could monetize this information.

We tried very hard to work with some of these third-party service providers for integration opportunities, but they are not willing to take any responsibility for the data with which they would also be custodians, nor have they been willing to share with us their own vendor vetting process.

As a business owner and decision maker, it feels irresponsible to let our customers share information directly between our system and these third-party services without ourselves being fully confident in the data practices of each vendor and without having received exclusive permission from consumers on how their data will be shared.

This stance does not contradict our view that the data we store in our system on your behalf is your data. You can freely remove your data from our system and share it with any services you choose.  However, while the data is retained in our system, we have an obligation to ensure it is protected and that it is only accessible by its rightful owners.

One of the comments we have received is that Google, Facebook, and other online services have not expressed these same concerns when integrating with similar services. I would direct your attention to the fact that this year alone, Facebook has acknowledged that at least 87 million records were breached. This, just on the heels of their political headaches resulting specifically from their own third-party data integrations. Moreover, these services don’t generally have the same kind of sensitive consumer information that our agents store in EZLynx. More importantly, these vendors have gotten into serious trouble with regulators all over the world in the past year. They are being forced to tighten their controls on data sharing and allow consumers, who many consider to be the ultimate owners of the data, to get their data removed upon request.

Finally, these companies are multi-billion-dollar companies that can, and will, fight huge legal battles to defend their business model. I cannot imagine our agents taking on these kinds of legal battles.

So where does this leave agents who are using EZLynx and wanting to integrate with these third-party services? We are currently preparing an integration with Zapier to allow for contact information export and lead information import, though a more extensive integration has been hampered by Zapier’s unwillingness to work with us on defining data security guidelines. EZLynx development work has already begun for this first version, and we hope to have a beta release by early next year.

For additional data sharing with these other services, I do like some of the suggestions that agents have made on our Facebook group, and we are open to implementing these. If you are interested in working with our product management team on defining the data exchange standards for EZLynx, and hopefully for our entire industry, please let us know. We believe that together we can find a middle ground that serves the best interests of EZLynx, the Agent, and the Consumer.

To continue the conversation, join us on our Customer Forums by logging in to EZLynx, clicking the Need Help link on the Dashboard, and then clicking on Forums.

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Changes to our Release Process

Posted on by Nag Rao

A Note from the CEO

As most EZLynx users noticed, our product has experienced poor performance recently. This has been the result of a major product update that we have been working to release over the past month – EZLynx version 4.18.09. We ended up rolling back the release to better understand the issue.

My sincere apologies to our customers for any inconvenience this caused. I want to take this opportunity to explain why we do product updates on weekdays and outline some internal changes we have decided to implement to help us avoid another incident like this.

When we are ready to release a new update, we have already done extensive internal analysis, including load metrics to understand as much as possible how the update might perform in our live environment. It is important to understand that it is extremely difficult to guarantee 100% success with any load testing in a real-time transaction system like EZLynx. When our quality assurance team has signed off on the release, we generally target Thursday or Friday for a release so that we can monitor the system performance at a normal level of usage. These days are typically our slower days but still high enough to give us a good feel for the release. This leaves us all weekend to resolve any quick fix issues that are discovered, ensuring that we minimize the possibility of having to roll back the update.

EZLynx takes pride in innovation and pushing the boundaries of what technology can do. We constantly make improvements to our products so that we can bring new and exciting features to your agency regularly – and we will continue to do so.

However, to ensure our users have a consistent experience when using our product, we will begin implementing a more staggered release plan so that we can be confident in the stability of the update as it is being released. This should avoid major product outages and performance issues because of a new release.

I know many of you have been eagerly anticipating the enhancements that are included in the 4.18.09 release. Our focus is to release those enhancements in smaller batches over the coming weeks and months, and we will do so in a way that does not cause any future outages.

We thank you for your support all these years, and I promise we will try harder to avoid problems like this going forward.

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EZLynx Roadmap for 2018

Posted on by Nag Rao

A Note from the CEO

Happy New Year! It looks like 2018 is going to be another good year for our industry. It is our feeling that independent agents have been well positioned in the market for more than a decade now. Our industry’s business model of offering ‘choice of carrier’ to consumers is both internet and millennial friendly. We believe our industry will continue to gain market share because of this one single factor.

I want to thank our customers who have supported our products through the years and our many new customers who joined us in 2017. Outlining the roadmap at the beginning of the year is a tradition that we started many years ago, and it seems the competition has followed our lead – I have seen several other management and rating system vendor CEOs do the same. It is inspiring to see the impact that our vision and strategic thinking has had on our industry, especially with our competition!

2017 has been another banner year for us as we once again expanded our market share. We are looking forward to another great year. As long as we continue to work towards your best interests, we will all win.

Agency profitability, productivity, and serviceability were the key focus areas in 2017. In the spirit of productivity and serviceability we enhanced our management system product throughout the year. Many of these enhancements were in direct response to your feedback. We introduced several new and exciting features in 2017, including claim downloads, policy change requests, enhanced reporting & analytics, and postal mail integration.  Claim downloads and the policy change request feature directly affect how you service your customers. I am particularly proud of my team’s effort with the policy change request feature, which allows the agent to capture all the necessary information and submit it to the carrier for finalization in a single workflow. As part of this workflow you can highlight and submit only the parts of the policy that will be changed to avoid any mistakes. This feature is priceless when it comes to change management with commercial policies where any mistake can be costly.

Our new postal mail integration is another one of my favorite features released last year. Agents are already using it heavily to mail important policy documents, policy notifications, welcome letters, and other documents to their policy holders or prospects with a few clicks of a button. It’s a great productivity enhancing feature that can save time and money.

We made several big enhancements to other areas of our product including reporting, policy accounting, agency workspace, and more. You can view our past release notes for more details on these features.

One of the big promises I made in 2017 was to focus on agency automation. We delivered a beta version of this feature in the second half of 2017. EZLynx Automation Center lets you define rules to perform certain actions based on policy events. In its first iteration, we limited the support to a handful of pre-defined events with simple email and task related actions. We have received excellent feedback from our beta participants, and we are excited to unveil some exciting new enhancements at our AgentLynx User Conference in March. It is our intention to robustly expand this feature with support for more events, actions, and more complex, condition-based workflows. EZLynx Automation Center will soon become the glue that integrates all our products and features together and drastically improves your productivity in incredible ways.

Roadmap for 2018

Our AgentLynx User Conference will be in San Diego this year on March 12 – 14. I strongly urge all of our customers to attend this exciting event if you are serious about building your agency around EZLynx. I promise you this is not about sales or marketing, but about technology, insurance, and maximizing your potential as independent agents. We will be introducing several new and cool products this year that my team has been working on for months now. You will also be able to speak directly with our Executive Team, Product Managers, Business Analysts, and select staff from our Product Support and Training Teams. The conference is just a few months away, so don’t wait to reserve your spot!

As for the rest of the year, we have a busy schedule ahead of us. We will continue to enhance our policy management system to round out more of our commercial features. One feature that I am excited about is Policy Transaction Editing. As most of you know, the dataset that we get from carriers through the download is inconsistent and sometimes wrong. Using this feature, you can control how you manage these inconsistencies by using a set of ‘crowd’ or user defined rules. Our goal is to reduce errors and also to make the download processing and matching effortless.

This year we will also officially release Automation Center, as well as expand it to include integration with our products like Sales Center, Retention Center, Policy Accounting, and more. It is our goal to let agents automate the daily important, but mundane, tasks that a computer can easily perform.

We have several new “secret” features for 2018 that we are excited to reveal at our AgentLynx User Conference, including our plans to refresh the look and feel of EZLynx with a new, modern interface. I want to end this note leaving you with the same impression as I always do – that EZLynx is dedicated to making you successful. We are constantly working on your behalf and watching out for market changes to make sure you are covered. We’ve got your back.

Please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions or comments.

-Nag Rao, CEO

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EZLynx Roadmap for 2017

Posted on by Nag Rao

A Note from the CEO

Happy New Year! I hope you all had a fantastic 2016! Based on the results of our annual customer survey, it seems you did – and we’re ready to help make 2017 even better.

The biggest highlight of 2016 for EZLynx came in October when we hosted our first AgentLynx User Conference in Dallas. Thank You to everyone that was able to attend! We had good participation from our agents and all our product sessions were extremely well attended. For me personally it was great to meet our customers face-to-face and listen to their feedback about our products. We are looking forward to the next AgentLynx User Conference to be held in San Diego sometime in March/April of 2018. Please be sure to register as soon as we make our announcement because we will be limiting the number of attendees.

EZLynx continues to make big strides in the industry. EZLynx was again acknowledged as the fastest growing management system vendor and is now the third biggest vendor behind Vertafore and Applied, according to the Big “I” and Future One 2016 Agency Universe study. More amazingly, our market share with EZLynx Rating Engine has continued to grow and is now a dominant number one in the market. I want to personally thank all our customers who chose EZLynx over other products and also enthusiastically responded to these industry surveys. I can assure you without your support EZLynx would not be the product it is today. Thanks once again from all of our employees.

We made some big new product announcements at AgentLynx 2016 – EZLynx Sales Center and an Amazon Alexa skill for agency owners. EZLynx Sales Center is an add-on product that lets agents manage their prospects and opportunities during the sales process. Similar to Retention Center, it is a highly optimized tool that helps keep all the information about your prospects at your fingertips. Sales Center has fantastic metrics with sales performance dashboards customized for each user. Sales Center will continue to evolve in 2017 with more features in the pipeline to include support for lead generator integration, EZLynx Consumer Quoting integration, custom fields, and more management reporting options. Please contact our sales team if you are interested in learning more about this innovative product.

Our Amazon Alexa skill started out as a playful experiment amongst our development team but soon turned out to be something bigger. We are fully committed to enhancing this app in the future based on your feedback. Alexa employs state of the art speech processing technology to parse your voice commands and provide meaningful responses. To be honest, Alexa is addictive and full of surprises once you start using it. I encourage our management system users to give our Alexa skill a try by searching for EZLynx from the Alexa app on your mobile device. Please note you do need to purchase an Alexa device from Amazon to be able to use this feature. Keep watching for more Alexa integrations in 2017!

I would like to quickly review what I outlined in my 2016 New Year’s article and update you on our progress. I made a promise to deliver a single platform customer lifecycle solution that can solve the challenges faced by our agents. Sales Center is an outstanding example of this. We realize how challenging the sales process can be, especially if you have multiple employees selling with different customer touch points. Sales Center centralizes all the activities under one screen and keeps all your employees on the same page. If you are an agency owner or a sales manager, it offers great reports and dashboards to monitor the performance of your team.

I also promised to make improvements to EZLynx Management System in 2016. We worked hard to build commercial features like manual policy data entry, quote proposals, applications, and ACORD® form support. We still have a few more commercial lines yet to support, but I expect to complete all lines by the end of 2017’s second quarter.

We made various other management system improvements with agency workspace, document management, and reporting that are too many to list.

EZLynx Accounting was seriously upgraded in 2016. We now have full support for branch accounting with integrated GL support for QuickBooks online.

If you are one of those rating customers waiting for our management system to fully mature, this may be the time. We have a solid data conversion team that will work with you to move your current policy data to EZLynx from more than 25 different management systems in less than 10 weeks. Please contact our sales team for more information. I can assure you that you will not regret your decision to move to EZLynx Management System!

I also promised to improve EZLynx Communication Center in 2016 with enhancements to Email Campaigns. You can now leverage our robust reporting feature by using your saved reports for bulk email blasts. Our reports allow you to create highly targeted upsell/cross-sell campaigns, and in turn, generate more leads from your existing customer data. We also added Custom Domains to help reduce spam blocking and to increase email open rate. Simply validate the domain that you use for email and our system will be able to send emails out on your behalf rather than under our own domain.

EZLynx Client Center was another product that I promised to improve in 2016. We have upgraded the user interface with a clean, modern look that is fully mobile responsive so that it behaves the same on any screen size. We also added support for commercial clients to add their own certificate holders and generate new certificates from within Client Center. This feature will let you offload some of this work to your customers while still allowing you to retain control over who gets access.

Looking Ahead…

Agency profitability, productivity, and serviceability have always been our focus areas. Beginning in 2017, agency automation is our new target area. We believe our users can experience significant gains in all levels of profitability, productivity, and serviceability by using system data to intelligently automate actions. We have exciting plans to make this happen with new EZLynx tools!

One goal of this type of automation is to allow you and your employees to focus more time on revenue-generating tasks. Through data analytics and business intelligence we feel confident that many of these processes can be automated without degrading the customer service experience. To the contrary, we believe this will actually improve the customer experience in the long run.

Our relentless focus on enhancing EZLynx Management System continues in 2017. We are already hard at work on enhancing commercial support, advanced accounting features, and much more. MAPs, or Market Access Providers, are another focus area for us in 2017. EZLynx Rating Engine is already the best rating product for this market with its built-in messaging and private carrier support. We plan to enhance some of these features to add support for policy management and policy servicing.

While I do not want to reveal the full scope of our Roadmap for competitive reasons, make no mistake that we have a vision for 2017 and beyond to make EZLynx the ultimate solution for independent agents.

I hope you have another prosperous year with EZLynx!

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Hey Agent, Kill the Music!

Posted on by Nag Rao

As you have probably read by now, we have had yet another private equity transaction in our industry to acquire control of a major agency system vendor. This particular vendor has changed hands three times since Y2K alone, and I don’t foresee this trend stopping anytime soon. I am sure we all can surmise reasonably well as to which vendor is next in line to change hands.

There is a game of musical chairs being played in our industry right now, and it’s happening at the agent’s expense! Agents should be concerned that one result of these ownership changes may be price increases with little or no investment in the vendor’s product. These private equity companies may well be counting on the control these vendors exert over the agent’s data and are making a bet that they can hold or increase their revenue without much pushback. Don’t let yourself be held hostage to your own data!

How do we stop this madness, you ask?

It is hard to point fingers at the private equity companies, since they have the fiduciary responsibility of increasing their ROI. The real blame falls on the independent agent. The agent is in full control of this game of musical chairs, but they just don’t know it. If agents will simply kill the music and walk away, these other vendors will quickly find that their chairs have been taken away.

As the vendor with the fastest growth in market share, EZLynx has demonstrated that changing agency management systems can be a painless process. Don’t let other vendors leave you feeling intimidated at the thought of changing your system. With a dedicated team of migration specialists, many agents have successfully switched to our product in less than 8 weeks! EZLynx is truly dedicated to improving our industry, and we work hard every day to make sure your agency costs remain sustainable. We believe that the cost structure of the independent agency model can be improved for the benefit of our industry. So, I challenge you to put an end to this game of musical chairs that these vendors are playing at your expense. Kill the music and end this game!

Find out how EZLynx can help your agency change systems, save money, and increase your productivity.

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EZLynx Roadmap for 2016

Posted on by Nag Rao

A Note from the CEO

Happy New Year! It is that time of the year when we take a look back at the previous year and make plans for this year. EZLynx made fantastic progress in 2015 on several fronts. EZLynx® Management System has made steady progress in the market, and we added a record number of agents. We also added several large agencies with $100M+ book size. This tells me that our product is being taken seriously and agents feel confident with our future strategy and roadmap.

Our strategy for 2016 remains unwavering – deliver a single platform customer lifecycle solution that relies on innovation to solve the challenges that independent agents face.

Retention Center

To that end, our biggest release last year was EZLynx Retention Center™, which monitors all the upcoming renewals in an agency and provides a prioritized list for the day. This is both a product and a service that comes with on-going collaboration by our team to help each agency follow the best practices for renewal processing. With Retention Center, EZLynx has once again pushed the boundary of what a management system should do for an agency. Agents who have been using Retention Center and following our process have seen a consistent increase in their retention rate.

Reporting

I made a commitment to make it easier to extract agency performance numbers from our system. We have released a brand new reporting platform integrated into EZLynx, which allows agencies that use EZLynx Management System to extract complicated reports and charts. In addition, agents can define their own reports and make them available to other users within the agency. Coming this year, you will also be able to schedule your custom reports to run automatically and have the results emailed to you. We are also constantly improving our monthly Agency Pulse® report to include even more useful information to help agents with their day to day decisions. I strongly recommend agencies that do not use our management system take a close look at our reporting capabilities.

Workflow

Our Agency Workspace feature is a fantastic workflow tool that lets agents keep track of their tasks and notifications in one place. In addition to upcoming enhancements to Agency Workspace that will add support for team tasks, we also have exciting plans for taking our entire Workflow engine to the next level in 2016. Watch for more details in the coming months.

Mobile

As promised, we made good progress with mobile support for EZLynx in 2015. Our mobile-optimized version now support EZLynx Text Messaging, as well as our enhancements to Notes and Tasks. We plan to add additional mobile support throughout this year as well.

Looking Ahead…

Management System

EZLynx Management System will continue to be our focus in 2016. Our new reporting tool is just the start, and we will continue to add new features to help give you the insight you need to manage your agencies.

Email Campaigns

We have also released an update to our integrated insurance email marketing campaign tool to lay the foundation for the enhancements we plan to make throughout this year. In addition to over 50 email design and 200 email content samples, you can now create multi-step drip campaigns for both individual applicants and bulk segments of your EZLynx data. Over the coming months we will address many of the suggestions that we have received from our users as we work to turn this feature into a powerful and useful part of your daily workflow.

Client Center

EZLynx Client Center will receive quite a bit of our focus this year as we bring enhancements to make both you and your customer’s lives easier. In addition to a new login process, we will also be adding greater support and features for commercial customers, streamlined consumer communication features, improved mobile support, and more.

The EZLynx Way

Finally, I want to reiterate our philosophy at EZLynx. We approach every project with this same simple idea – how can we help agents be more productive in this increasingly competitive industry. Our goal is to build a system that will help your agency for the next 20 years. We try hard to offer the best customer service to our users; likewise, we want to empower our users to offer the best possible customer service to their own customers through the use of our tools and services.

As always, please do not hesitate to contact me below for any comment, question or suggestion you might have. Wishing you a prosperous 2016!

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The E&O Risks with Non-Downloading Carriers

Posted on by Nag Rao

Nag Rao, EZLynx CEOOur world, whether we like it or not, has become always-on and fully connected. This is especially true for the insurance industry, which is so heavily dependent on accurate and timely information.

When we decided to build an agency management system into EZLynx, it was our goal to build a system that was more than the ‘glorified notepad’ offered by our competition. It was our goal to not only parse and process the policy information that comes from the carrier as part of their daily download, but also to do something useful for the agency with that information.

EZLynx Retention Center® demonstrates this design philosophy. Agents who are subscribed to our patented Retention Center can see an intelligently prioritized list of renewals to work on as part of their daily workflow. The way this product is designed, agents work down their list of renewals in Retention Center from highest priority to lowest priority, with the goal of clearing all the high priority renewals from the Retention Center as quickly as possible using our proven process – ultimately improving their overall agency and carrier retention rates along the way!

This brings us to the problem of carriers who don’t download. EZLynx Retention Center switches to complete manual mode for the policies from those carriers. Although it still displays the upcoming renewal based on the manually entered expiration date[1], it still means the agent is responsible for manually maintaining all the policy information, including renewals and changes, within EZLynx. This imposes a severe burden on agency retention staff, who are already stretched thin by trying to keep up with renewals.

From what we have seen in the real world with Retention Center, agents simply forget or don’t bother to update manual policy information, which pretty much makes it impossible to effectively manage the renewals. We regularly see manual policies slipping through the cracks during renewal time. Not only could this be a serious E&O risk for many agencies if they forget to check on the carrier site for non-renewals, but it’s also a terrible experience for the customer, who often chooses an independent agent for the personal touch!

Another big example of the negative impact of non-downloading carriers within EZLynx is the lack of full policy self-servicing support for these policy holders in EZLynx Client Center. EZLynx Client Center allows the agency customer to go to their agent’s website 24/7 and log in to their account. They can print their proof of insurance, ask their agent a question, request a change to their policies, and more.

The simple fact is that carriers hurt both their agents and themselves when they choose not to download information into an agent’s management system – especially a smart agency management system like EZLynx. If the agents are writing with carriers who don’t download to save money for their customers, they do so at a high financial cost for their business and a watered down level of service for their customers.

This begs the question as to why agents work with carriers who do not download, and what agents can do about it. As is clear from the above examples, if the agents are doing this to help their customers, the opposite may in fact be happening. Next time you want to write a policy with a non-downloading carrier, please think twice. Consider letting carriers know that you’re less likely to present their rate to the consumer due to the increased financial burden of servicing and renewing a manual policy. Carriers rely on independent agents to be their extended sales and customer service arm. At the very least, they could work to make sure you have the most up to date information and resources at your fingertips.

Learn more about EZLynx Management System, EZLynx Client Center, and EZLynx Retention Center…

[1] The sentence was amended to point out that Retention Center still alerts agents of expiring manual policies.

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Industry Consolidation Brings Uncertainty for Agents

Posted on by Nag Rao

A Note from the CEOAs you may already know, there were two insurance industry company acquisitions announced in the past few weeks. The two major vendors are now once again in the process of consolidating their market positions through acquisition, rather than providing superior products and services. Given the availability of easy liquidity in the market, it was rather surprising that it took so long for this buy-out fever to reach our industry.

The general rule of thumb with these kinds of acquisitions is the weak gets consumed by the strong. If you happen to be the customer of one of these acquired products, it puts you in an extremely precarious situation. You suddenly don’t know what is coming next and where the product you have come to rely on is headed. There is nothing worse to deal with in a business than uncertainty!

That Raises the Question – What about EZLynx?

EZLynx prides itself on being independent (just like you!) and out-of-the-box thinkers. We have always believed that our industry has had too many meaningless players with no long term plans, and simply put, are in it to make a fast buck. These acquisitions are good at cleaning up the industry and increasing the opportunity for the remaining players like EZLynx. In fact, we believe that our entry into the agency management system market has made such a dramatic impact on the marketplace that it has resulted in some of these acquisitions. Either way, if you happen to be our customers, you can rest easy knowing that EZLynx is in it for the long haul.

The EZLynx® Platform, which is a single system for comparative rating, management system, retention tools, and marketing tools, is a very compelling solution that most agencies are finding hard to resist. Our management system is now the third most popular system in the market and the fastest growing system in the last two years as per the latest industry survey.

Our latest groundbreaking solution for policy renewal management, EZLynx Retention Center™, is a revolutionary product that has dramatically changed how agents manage their renewals. Agents who are using this product cannot stop raving about the successes they are experiencing.

We will continue as always to bring more innovative products to market in the coming months and years. That is the fundamental difference between EZLynx and these other companies – We believe that building a superior product and putting the needs of our users first is how to win in this industry.

It is our ultimate goal to streamline and enhance every business function of an agency with our One Platform solution. We feel our industry is under attack from well-funded outsiders, and it is our responsibility to empower our agents with a suite of tools to fight this challenge.

To learn more about EZLynx Retention Center, you can watch a testimonial video from one of our users here.

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Introducing EZLynx Retention Center

Posted on by Nag Rao

A New Era in Policy Renewal Management

In the EZLynx Roadmap for 2015, I dropped a hint about a big new product announcement coming later this year. Well, here it is…

I would like to announce the release of a ground breaking product called EZLynx Retention Center for personal lines renewal management, available as an add-on to EZLynx Management System customers only. We are extremely proud of this product because it has taken nearly 24 months of hard work to get from conception to release, and it’s as revolutionary as our original real-time rating tool!

EZLynx strongly believes that personal lines is under direct attack from other industries. One way for small agencies to combat this challenge is to be smart about how you service policies and manage renewals. EZLynx Retention Center addresses the daunting task of renewal management. With Retention Center, you no longer wait for your customer to call and complain about rate hikes at renewal. Instead, our system will identify on a daily basis those customers that you are most at risk of losing so that you can focus your efforts in the right place. As part of our twelve month beta program, several agencies used EZLynx Retention Center and, not surprisingly, noticed a huge increase in retention!

I want to spend some time impressing upon you the importance of retention. I have always been surprised during any one-on-one conversation with agents on the question of what their agency retention rate is. Agents are never sure of what their exact agency retention numbers are, but they always think it’s good. We have identified a solid and obtainable agency retention rate as being in the 90-95% range. However, you may be surprised to hear that the average retention rate across all EZLynx agencies was only around 75%.

Three years ago we made it one of our goals to attack this problem head-on for our customers. As a first step, we started delivering a monthly email report called EZLynx Agency Pulse for all EZLynx Management System customers. In addition to agency retention numbers, Agency Pulse has several key agency performance metrics that we believe every agency owner should be using as a guide to manage their business. As our second step, EZLynx Retention Center removes the drudgery of trying to manually manage your renewals.

During our beta testing, we worked with 5 large agencies to gauge just what kind of results we could see with this tool. To our delight, and to that of our beta agencies, we found that with very little effort agents were able to hit our 90-95% retention target within 3 months! Think about that…

For a book size of $10M, that’s at least $100,000 in additional annual revenue!

We believe that EZLynx Retention Center is a powerful tool that can help your business become more profitable. We have several exciting tools in development that continue our trend of finding innovative ways to help independent agents manage their top and bottom line.

Please remember that in order to enjoy the benefits of our complete customer lifecycle solution, the first step is to switch to EZLynx Management System!

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