Guest blogs are written by contributors outside of HawkSoft. The author's views are entirely their own and may not reflect the views of HawkSoft.

Your insurance agency faces complications every day, from collecting sensitive customer information to negotiating policies. The stakes are high, and budgets only stretch so thin. And the industry is constantly changing.

That’s a lot to manage. Finding the right digital automation tools for managing forms, signatures, and documents can make your agency more productive and profitable. Let's take a quick look at how you can overcome the most common roadblocks to insurance productivity—with the right set of tools.

In this article:

• Streamline the most important processes
• Capture and convert the right data
• Keep security breaches at bay
• Reach for digital maturity

Streamline the most important processes

It's not just what employees do that influences business outcomes, but how they get that work done—which is why companies with the highest levels of success tend to have highly efficient workflows in place.

This is where insurance agency automation comes in. The easier it is for brokers and agents to communicate and collaborate, the better positioned you’ll be to onboard new customers and address important issues. Within the realm of insurance, new business process flows can be particularly tricky, but the right digital tools can help.

At Formstack (the system powering HawkSoft E-Signature), we’ve been hard at work creating a series of automation features designed to improve common insurance processes. These tools help you:

• Win over new clients with custom quotes and proposals that can be generated and signed in minutes.
• Easily manage insurance policies, updates, and renewals with digital processes designed to help agencies retain more business.
• Process claims faster by simplifying submissions and automating the creation of claims reports.
• Streamline workflows associated with mission-critical processes by pairing your insurance forms with Formstack’s Workflows. New form submissions will be automatically routed to the right team members to review, edit, and approve as needed. It’s one of the fastest, easiest ways to minimize the time it takes to manage proposals, policies, and claims.

Capture and convert the right data

Most insurance agencies are drowning in data, yet extracting the exact information you need can be surprisingly overwhelming.

The reason is simple: even though the world is generating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day, only 0.5% of it is ever analyzed. As a result, many businesses are shrouded in a cloud of customer information with few insights they can actually act on. It’s a problem that plagues companies across industries, and insurance is no exception.

Yet according to PwC, data analytics is the key to insurance productivity. Gaining access to the right insights not only helps with insurance agency automation, but can also go a long way in quantifying the pain points that cause customers to leave. Insurance companies that have learned to maximize their data have lower acquisition costs and higher levels of customer satisfaction.

The faster and more efficiently you can capture customer data and transform it into actions, the better positioned you’ll be to increase employee productivity and overall profitability. Using a robust online form builder is the first step toward collecting the exact information you need—and then turning it into the right processes.

Keep security breaches at bay

One of the biggest challenges faced by insurance agencies? Cybersecurity. Because insurance agencies work with sensitive client data, there's a constant tension between keeping data as secure as possible and making it accessible when and where agents need it without hindering productivity.

Too often, agencies are forced to rely on legacy systems without good security, or secure systems that don't play well with their established workflows. This is where a third-party platform can help companies meet even the strictest insurance standards and regulations, freeing agents to focus on getting things done—without having to work around tricky security procedures and policies.

Insurance agencies across all verticals, from home and auto to life and liability, can benefit from Formstack’s advanced data encryption, audit trails, and other ongoing security features designed to help companies maximize efficiency while decreasing risk.

For those dealing with health insurance, Formstack offers a specialized form builder that makes it easy to collect electronic signatures and create digital documents in ways that won’t increase your risk of HIPAA noncompliance fees and fines.

Reach for digital maturity

Not only do digital automation tools increase productivity, but they can help your employees save two hours a day by eliminating repetitive, manual tasks. In fact, our research shows that 86% of employees prefer digital over paper. So you’ll be making them happier while also improving your overall customer experience. This also frees up employees to get back to doing the impactful work that keeps your agency running. 

Not to mention that digitally mature companies more easily retain top talent, keep clients coming back, and increase productivity. With that in mind, there’s no better time to start investing in workflow automation than now.