Happy New Year, and Happy New Decade! We made huge strides in enhancing and expanding our platform last year, and we’re thrilled about the upcoming year.

We remain focused on solving industry problems through technology, and we have many exciting product changes on our 2020 Roadmap. I am confident that we are well-positioned to help agencies excel in scalability, serviceability, productivity, and profitability with our products.

We also shared a special ROADMAP EDITION of EZLynx LIVE on January 30, 2020.  The Live stream has ended, but you can still watch the recording. We provided a closer look at our 2020 Roadmap. Be sure to watch it here.

AgentLynx was a Success

Thank you to everyone who attended AgentLynx 2019. Our team enjoyed meeting you and learning the nuances of how you use EZLynx to drive your agency. We appreciate the details you shared with our product team throughout the conference. Even though we cannot solve every industry problem right away, much of the credit for our success is due to the feedback we receive and the passion you bring. We know that your time is valuable and appreciate your collaboration. You are valuable partners.

Commercial Innovation

Last year, I promised features that solved business problems faced by commercial agents, and our team delivered! Solutions that worked for the industry and clientele of thirty years ago cannot continue to scale for the future. Client expectations change, so we want to provide tools that help agencies scale without losing their superior personalized service – before and after the sale. We delivered a series of features to help agents sell, service, and grow commercial business:

• Application Bundling (New Feature)
  • This single, efficient workflow helps agencies avoid redundant data across applications, policies, and remarketing.
• Schedule Imports & Exports (New Features)
  • EZLynx simplified the import workflow for drivers, vehicles, locations, and buildings. We also added a comprehensive export workflow to expedite the renewal process.
• Forms Workflows (New Feature)
  • EZLynx now automatically preselects and prefills the ACORD forms needed for an accurate quote based on the line of business and the state. Adding additional forms, like loss runs, carrier supplementals, or financials, is very straightforward too.
• Certificates (New Feature)
  • EZLynx redefined the creation, management, and distribution of certificates, streamlining the workflow and changing the way agencies think about the certificate process.

EZLynx Submission Center

We also launched EZLynx Submission Center – a product created to streamline the commercial submission process – last fall. Submission Center enables agents to manage submissions to multiple carriers by organizing the activities for the entire process. Built-in reports, dashboards, and carrier appetite guidance ensure the process scales efficiently as the agency brings in more commercial business. You can learn more about EZLynx Submission Center here. We will continue to build on this foundation during the year.

Drive for EZLynx 5

EZLynx 5 represents the next generation of our platform, and it is rolling out in the first half of 2020! We have completely streamlined the Rating Engine to improve quote generation speed and accuracy. I’m particularly excited about the productivity gains we’ve seen from two specific features during our beta testing: carrier prefill and the new quote results page.

The carrier prefill option allows agents to save time by answering common carrier questions up-front. When the agent wants to generate a quote, these answers automatically populate the appropriate fields, drastically reducing the time it takes to get that initial quote!

The new quote results page displays the carrier’s quotes in a simplified stacked bar graph. This completely takes the guesswork – and math – out of providing your customers a premium. This feature is exceptionally powerful when you’re rounding accounts and quoting both auto and homeowners.

With EZLynx 5, our Management System customers will see enhancements to core features they use daily, including a new account and policy page, and an improved EZLynx 5 version of Automation Center. Our goal is to drive an agency forward through automation and make it easier to sell, service, and grow, whether you’re an agency of 10 or 10,000!

EZLynx 5 represents a complete foundational change to our platform — and we’re just getting started!

Service that Scales

For several years, the EZLynx growth roadmap focused on increasing agency profitability and productivity. While these will continue to be focus areas for us, this year we are also focused on improving serviceability and scalability for your agency.

EZLynx MAP, a product designed to provide complex organizations with the information they need to service their agencies and grow past common plateaus, is a perfect example of this new company focus. We are excited to announce general availability in April 2020!

Last year we introduced our Real-Time Messaging expansion with Travelers. This integration notifies agents – in real-time — of policy changes the insured makes on the Travelers self-service portal. This enhancement improves transparency between agents and carriers to better support the omni-channel awareness this generation of consumers expects. Service activities are costly to agencies without providing a significant return. However, the integration has the potential to dramatically reduce time spent servicing these policies. We see this as an opportunity to provide new solutions that help your staff increase their service capacity, without sacrificing quality, in the coming year.

Connect to the Future

EZLynx has historically built its success on providing agents everything they need to grow a successful, manageable business. We developed our ONE PLATFORM customer lifecycle solution to address major challenges in renewal management, sales, customer service, and more—all in one easy-to-use location. However, 2020 will bring a slight directional shift in our strategy. Starting this year, EZLynx will focus on an Agency-in-the-Cloud strategy. Our goal is to help agencies scale through innovative hardware and software solutions.

To that end, we unveiled EZLynx Connect At AgentLynx 2019. EZLynx Connect is a marketplace for agents and vendors to exchange data securely. We designed this tool to address the core challenges of scalability, accessibility, and continuity that agencies face every day. EZLynx Connect will be a focus area for us throughout the upcoming year and beyond as we continue to build out third-party integrations with trusted vendor partners. But there’s more. We listened to your feedback and discovered that maintaining scalable hardware is a challenge many agents encounter as they grow. That’s why we’ve introduced EZLynx Virtual Office, a service that allows agencies to focus on their core competencies in the insurance space without worrying about managing their own hardware, software, or security. We will be providing more information about Virtual Office throughout the year.

We are here for you. If our software can help your agency scale better, increase your productivity, improve your customer service, and be more profitable, we both win. Thank you again for the opportunity to serve you. We look forward to continuing our partnership with all of you in 2020 and beyond!

Don’t forget to rewatch the special edition of EZLynx LIVE that aired earlier today, as we took a closer look at the 2020 Roadmap…