January Cover Story

Check Your Agency Dashboard
How healthy is your agency? To find out, start here.

The hour is late, but you can’t sleep. Your agency is underperforming and you know it. But you don’t yet have this month’s reports, so you’re unsure exactly where the agency stands. And making adjustments before you have proof of problems is downright irrational. Wouldn’t it be great to have software that, at the click of your mouse, collects, analyzes and presents real-time information on each critical aspect of your business? All on one easy-to-read screen?

Rise, shine, and smell the coffee. You can buy tools that do it: dashboards. Like a vehicle’s instrument panel, they can monitor every vital process of your agency’s business and allow you to check the status of your agency at any time, in real time. No more waiting for monthly reports, no more opening a dozen windows to monitor progress. No more time lost before you can take corrective action. Dashboards collect data from virtually all of your systems to provide what is literally your agency’s big picture.

As a concept and as hardware, dashboards have been around for more than a decade. But their use was restricted to wealthy companies that could afford to build them. Only recently have developers learned how to create dashboards from software. The result is a bevy of dashboard products that small- to mid-size businesses can use to track progress and financial health.

In the Driver’s Seat

Patrick Arnold, vice president of sales at Filice Insurance in Lafayette, Calif., uses a dashboard system from NetSuite to monitor and manage all of his firm’s sales activities.

"We needed a sales and customer relationship management solution," Arnold says. Prior to using NetSuite, the agency had no universal system, allowing its producers to use their own data-management programs. Arnold examined three dashboard management tools and then chose NetSuite because the product as designed could perform the majority of functions the agency required. "The rest," Arnold says, "was simple customization to conform to our business model."

Filice’s two operations managers spent a week mapping the functions of the agency’s business model, selecting the data to use as key performance indicators and deciding which information to track in the future. The managers then worked with NetSuite’s professional services group to customize the dashboard per the agency’s needs.

The results, Arnold says, are "phenomenal." From lead lists to phone calls and conversion rates, from customer retention to growth figures, Filice Insurance now knows the minute-by-minute status of any piece of business—or prospective business—it has.

Filice also could use the NetSuite system to monitor the agency’s complete financial health, but so far, it hasn’t implemented this function. It has, however, signed a four-year contract with NetSuite. "Their product is by no means cheap, but it’s very affordable for a company our size," Arnold says. With close to 60 employees, the agency’s need to monitor more functions may be just around the corner.

Eyes on the Road Ahead

Perhaps you’re thinking: "It’s just another gadget to buy." Mary Hauri, president of ICMotion in Janesville, Wis., might agree. "Without training and truly understanding the benefits, agents will see dashboards as one more thing to put time into," says Hauri, who specializes in helping agencies make optimum use of their technology. Further dampening many agents’ enthusiasm for a new tool, she suspects, is a prevailing desire to spend their technology dollars getting more from the system(s) they already have.

But Hauri sees dashboards as highly valuable tools. By lifting data from Excel spreadsheets and other applications, "dashboards show you where the problems are so you can work on them," she says. "Dashboards can make agency monitoring an exact science. Utilizing dashboards to analyze business processes and implementing sound business solutions based on dashboard data is the ultimate benefit of all the software investments that agencies have made over the last 10 years."

There are caveats, of course. If you don’t select the appropriate data to monitor, you get an inaccurate picture of your agency’s performance. And if you don’t correctly analyze the information you receive, you may misdirect your efforts toward "fixing" the wrong things.

"You have to be able to analyze the data and know what it means to your particular business," Hauri says. "When vendors can quantify the benefits of dashboards to agency owners, clearly we will see a stronger move toward a dashboard environment."

Some vendors are now beginning to do that. Bowstreet, a provider of portal-based business tools and solutions, has teamed with IBM to deliver technology that includes a dashboard for Hanover Insurance Companies in Worcester, Mass. Working with Bowstreet’s project team, the carrier replaced its spreadsheet and paper-based reporting system with a single, "intuitive" (easy-to-use), user interface that allows you to view windows from several applications simultaneously. "Most of these reports had been available only monthly," a Hanover executive told Bowstreet. "Now managers come in every morning and see what kinds of business were closed the previous night."

"I don’t see any barriers to prevent smaller businesses from doing the same thing," says Steve Ricketts, vice president of marketing for Bowstreet. "Most portal vendors have different package options that make it affordable for small companies, because these firms don’t need all of the scalability that larger companies do."

Among the business intelligence suppliers recently releasing dashboard management software are Microsoft, whose Business Scorecard Manager 2005 allows users to track and score key performance indicators against goals, and Hyperion, whose System 9 weds a financial management application to a business intelligence platform, which together can define databases and then extract relevant information. Other vendors with dashboard management tools in development include Business Objects, whose business Objects XI suite will allow users to assemble data by asking questions, and SAS, whose working title for its dashboard product is "BI for the masses."

Compact Fit

Still more dashboard products are being designed by smaller developers for small businesses. The Opus Group’s Opus Suite, for example, can be customized to measure premium volume, customer retention, loss ratios and other vital agency data. But Opus CEO Mike Callaghan says his firm’s expertise in and operational knowledge of the insurance industry is what adds the most value to Opus products.

For example, IIABA’s Best Practices are a good starting point for selecting the criteria your dashboard system will monitor. To help agencies choose their direction, Opus Group experts sit down with client leaders to discuss their business objectives for the next several years. "We also ask about the market’s perception of the company, what the company would like that perception to be, and what they want most to be known for," Callaghan says.

From there, the Opus team drills down to study the client’s procedures and processes, breaking them down into individual steps. "Once we have this data, we begin optimizing the processes, eliminating extra steps and duplication across departments," Callaghan says. "From this effort, we’re able to understand how the organization should operate, which leads us to the metrics they need to measure to show whether improvements are being made."

Next is installing the Opus Suite technology to measure the chosen data and combine it with data from other applications to create the final dashboard (see graphic above). Opus then trains client users and managers on both the new processes and the new technology, "to be sure they have something they can use," says Callaghan, "instead of just another piece of technology on their desktops."

Custom Design

You can even create your own dashboard management tool. Dave Stafford, CEO of The Stafford Agency in Gilbert, Ariz., owns WeSpeakInsurance.com, a bilingual Web site for Latinos and Hispanics to learn about and purchase coverage. Stafford hired programmers to build his Web site who, without being asked, designed a dashboard to view the site’s lead volume, lead origin, sales status and revenues produced. "I liked it so well I wanted to be able to do the same thing in the agency," Stafford says.

Soon his programmers delivered a dashboard to monitor agency progress. The agency dashboard monitors sales production, customer retention, loss ratios and business growth. Says Stafford, "I don’t know now how I could do without it."

It’s not simply that Stafford likes bells and whistles. He relies on his dashboard to tell him whether his agency is on track to earn contingency fees. "The way bonuses are structured, you’re going to be a lot better off if you put this stuff on a dashboard," he says. "Why would you work so hard when your dashboard shows that all you have to do is increase your retention rate a single point to earn your bonus?"

Why, indeed, when you could hire someone for less than $10 an hour to call your clients and tell them how important they are to you? And that you have a new product, perhaps towing and rental-car coverage, that will increase their protection and add enough premium to improve your loss ratio to the next level? "You wouldn’t know to do this if you don’t monitor your [statistics]," Stafford says.

The Stafford Agency also uses its dashboard to gauge which sales efforts are most effective each year and if results are stable, declining or improving. "We want to make sure we’re maximizing our potential," Stafford says. "Dashboards help us do that."

The Next Step

So far, only a small percentage of independent agents appear to be familiar with dashboards. Calls to a number of Best- Practices agencies suggested that for most, dashboards are not yet on the radar. Said one agency operations officer, "I’ve never heard of them, but they sound like something we’d be interested in." Said another, "We have one in our agency management system, but we haven’t figured out how to use it." A third agency had a different response: "We did use the dashboard tool that is displayed on the main menu of our [agency management system]," said the agency’s administrator, "but we have other third-party tools that do all of this for us in a more user-friendly fashion."

Frank Coates, partner of Coates Analytics Group, recently developed a dashboard for a financial services client, keenly observes: "Dashboards will be a hot topic, [but] I think most businesses will create dashboards that are nothing more than fancy reports with nice graphics. This craze will end quickly. [But] the concept of building tools that are specific to essential measures and include a dashboard will be persistent… Businesses do not need another set of data. They need to use the data they already have to achieve better results." Is a dashboard management tool in your agency’s future?

Susan L. Hodges (hodgeswrites@aol.com) is an IAcontributing writer.

Candidates for Dashboard Monitoring 

You may decide to choose some or all of these data as key performance indicators, or to add others to your agency dashboard.

• Cashflow
• Premium volume (week, month, quarter, year)
• Revenue per employee
• Loss Ratios
• Retention Rate
• Bonus Tracking
• Volume of new business
• Sales Data (lead tracking, conversion counts)
• Technical Downtime (per month, year to date)

Steps to Building a Dashboard 

1. Define the key performance measures that indicate success for your agency.
2. Gather the data that captures these measures.
3. Analyze the data against a well-defined set of benchmarks, such as Best Practices.
4. Display the status of the measures and all supporting data and documents in an intuitive dashboard system.
5. Pre-plan and automate (or implement) remedial actions when measures fall short of benchmarks.

---Courtesy of Frank Coates

Questions for Dashboard Vendors

1. What experience/expertise do you have in the insurance industry?
2. May we customize our dashboard to monitor any data we desire, from any system?
3. Describe the support you’ll provide if we purchase your product:

4. Do you have a range of products we can choose from, at different prices?
5. Does your product provide real-time results?
6. Can you describe the platform(s) and technologies your product uses?
7. How do you charge for your product (by user, by workstation)?
8. Is there an up-front fee as well as monthly charges?
9. If we are required to sign a contract, how long is the contract period?
10. Are there benefits for signing a longer-term contract later?