An insurance agency management system is a software-as-a-service solution, also known as SaaS, with everything agencies need to manage the complete customer lifecycle, all in one place. Management systems streamline workflows across your agency so that you can get through tasks more efficiently and with more precision. The best AMS solutions are automated and have tools to handle quoting, sales, customer service, insurance policy management, retention, payments, reporting and analytics.

Insurance Agency Management System vs. Customer Relationship Management

There can be confusion about the difference between an AMS and a CRM. While an agency management system encompasses every aspect of agency operations and can include a customer relationship management system, CRM software only handles the agency operations related to growing client relationships. While an AMS encompasses every aspect of agency operations and can include a CRM system, CRM software only handles the agency operations related to growing client relationships. This can include software that tracks leads, facilitates communication with insureds via email marketing and text messaging, stores client information, identifies cross-sell opportunities, and measures the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. An AMS can have all these capabilities in addition to tools that help with agency operations like accounting, reporting and analytics, and automation that aren’t directly related to fostering the customer relationship.

Now that you’ve got the basics down, let’s review some of the tools your agency management software should offer and what those tools can do for your agency.

Comparative Rater

Whether you’re offering customers personal lines and/or commercial lines quotes, your rating engine should be fully integrated with your agency management system. When you can access your rating engine through your AMS, you don’t have to waste time toggling back and forth between your rating and agency management tools. You’ll also be able to leverage the data in your rating engine via your AMS to find sales leads and to get insights into your agency’s health. EZLynx Rating Engine™ is an example of a personal lines rating engine that offers these benefits. The solution brings real-time quotes from hundreds of insurance companies across 48 states on any device, so you can give customers quotes quickly. 

Customer Service

An agency management system that provides outstanding online customer service helps you keep clients happy with 24/7 access to your business, which is what modern insureds expect. A customer service portal like EZLynx Communication Center™ gives your clients access to their ID cards and documents. It lets them request policy changes online any time, day or night. This saves your agency time by reducing hours spent responding to customer requests via phone. If you happen to use EZLynx Management System™,  all customer details, policy information, notes, and history are stored for the entire agency to access in real time. That means your agency can deliver faster and higher quality customer service while reducing errors and omissions with a clear audit trail.

Retention

An agency management system should contain all the tools you need to investigate and proactively manage renewals with your insureds. You should never be caught off guard by clients coming up for renewal, and those renewal policies should be downloaded to your AMS as soon as they’re available from the carrier. A modern AMS should also compare the current and the renewal policies side-by-side so your staff can quickly understand any premium-bearing changes.

Sales

Your AMS shouldn’t just help you manage customers’ policies; it should also help you identify and win over more customers. When your sales software is integrated into your management system, you can easily use the data from your rating engine and book of business to build your sales pipeline, identifying and winning over more prospects. EZLynx Sales Center™ lets you run the entire sales process from a single platform that’s part of EZLynx Management System, saving your staff time by eliminating the need for spreadsheets and multiple systems. With the automation in EZLynx Sales Center, you can even contact a prospect and start the sales or cross-selling process automatically, saving your agents the effort and time it takes to manually contact prospects.

Accounting

Accounting tools in your agency management system can boost profitability, save time, and improve efficiency and accuracy. Tools for record-keeping and tracking can also help you get more insight into your agency’s financial health, track earned and paid commissions, and help separate your earned commissions from your premiums to ensure your premium trust is balanced. EZLynx Agency Accounting™ is one example of insurance-specific accounting software that helps agencies handle accounting efficiently and accurately with features that help agencies manage tasks and gain insight into their business’s financial health.

Payments Processing

Customer payments processing is a useful tool to integrate with your AMS accounting functions, providing customers a checkout page with your agency’s branding where they can pay their premiums. This checkout page makes payments processing easier for you and your customers by allowing them to pay with credit card, ACH, a digital wallet, and other methods, while shortening collection and processing time. Applied Pay™, an electronics payments hub that integrates with EZLynx Agency Management System, even automates accounts receivable reconciliation and notifies customers of payment due dates to reduce your workload. With a tool like Applied Pay, you can securely view transactions in real time, provide refunds, issue receipts, and send notifications – all from a single, easy-to-use dashboard.

Reporting and Analytics

Data and analytics features are critical tools in your AMS that help you track and maintain agency growth. These tools allow you to measure KPIs and get in-depth performance analytics that tell you how your business is doing. EZLynx Reporting and Analytics™ even generates custom charts and summary tables that you can add to your dashboard, giving you the ability to make the reports that your agency needs. With customized and filtered data reporting and analytics, you can set and keep up with agency goals, see how you’re measuring up to competitors, and ensure you’re on target.

Automation

AMS automation can boost productivity across your agency. Automation takes care of important but repetitive tasks and processes, freeing your insurance agents to focus on more revenue-generating activities. You can use automation to take advantage of sales opportunities with immediate outreach, to improve follow-up with current customers, and to reduce human error caused by manually entering data into your system. You can even use automation software to automate sales campaigns for more outreach to more prospects and customers in less time, and automation can establish and maintain best practice workflows across operations. EZLynx Automation Center™ has all these task management functions and offers a special feature to increase positive reviews by automating requests for Google® reviews from your most satisfied customers.

Key Takeaways

We hope this blog has helped you understand what an agency management system is and which tools to look for in your next AMS. An agency management system shouldn’t just help you with one or two agency tasks. Instead, a high-quality AMS will help you get more done across the board, from sales and renewals to customer servicing and accounting. Your agency management system should also offer automation across these functions to speed up tasks in every area of operations.

Ready to find the AMS that’s just right for you? Check out our Build Your Own Tech Stack Tool to get started.