Being an insurance agent requires a certain amount of care and bedside manner with clients. They want to know that you’re their advocate when dealing with insurance providers and expect to reach you during some of the worst times of their life. Agents spend a great deal of time maintaining relationships with their pool of clients to keep them retained and interested in buying more coverage. Often they’re their own marketing, sales, and customer support teams rolled into one.
With so many hats to wear, it generates a lot of paperwork. Near the end of a day of talking with clients, providers, underwriters, and others, there’s still paperwork associated with those dealings that you need to file. It overwhelms you and you have to play catch-up throughout the week, eating into the time you need to foster your relationships with clients.
It’s tough to take on more clients because it means more paperwork. As a single agent, you only have so much bandwidth. You’d like to do more, but more importantly, you don’t want to neglect the customers you have. Imagine the time you’d save if the paperwork processes you’re responsible for could be handled with automation. It’s easier than you think.
Zonal OCR
Filing paperwork is mundane but necessary work. It’s something you can’t exactly slack on since organization is important, but even more essential is making sure you’re filing things to remain compliant with various laws. We can’t neglect it, but there is a way to do a little bit of work once, then let the paperwork literally file itself.
Whether you work with physical or digital documents, advanced optical character recognition (OCR) technology with document management software allows you to create a smart filing system. Zonal OCR is software that recognizes the text on image files like PDFs, then takes that data and creates a profile of all the pertinent information on the document.
The system can then route the document to where you want in the system based on that profile data. For example, a form with the client’s name on it will automatically be routed to that client’s folder in the system. All you have to do was scan it in. You can set up the routing anyway you prefer, such as routing documents based on the policy number. If you’re scanning in a document for a new client that doesn’t yet have a folder in your system, it will detect this and automatically create a folder and name it using the profile data. The system is so efficient, that you can scan in a large stack of paperwork at once, and the system will sort it all out.
Templates
An efficient filing system requires a specific and consistent folder structure. However, this means whenever you add a new client or new project, you need to go through the work of manually creating the folder and sub-folders. This is another time-consuming task that can also be prone to errors.
Folder templates are your ticket to making sure you don’t keep repeating mundane work. You simply have to create the folder structure once. For example, a folder for new clients that include subfolders for their basic information, claims history, policy agreements, etc. You can also add common files you want to be included in the folders as well as predefined file names. You can save it and recreate it anytime you need it. However, in a document management system, the folder structure is just one part of creating templates.
In a digital storage solution, you need the option to set permissions, governance, and automation preferences to your folders. Folder templates should also include the options to attach these settings to templates so the user doesn’t have to manually set them.
Rubex by eFileCabinet is a system designed to save you time by handling the redundancy of paperwork using automation and intelligent organization software to allow you more time to work with your clients. See Rubex in action – click here to view a free demo.
