Today’s sales professionals spend only 28% of their workweek selling. This figure is down from 34% just five years ago. Sales teams form the backbone of organizations, responsible for our companies’ growth and success. But too much time is being spent on administrative functions that could easily be performed by the right technology. This would free up teams to focus on securing new business rather than sitting behind their desks, clicking through screen after screen as they try and maintain their vital policy contact data in the agency’s AMS.
The number of clicks it takes to perform this task may seem like a trivial matter, but when added to an already overwhelming administrative burden, the simple act of maintaining the integrity of policy contact data in an agency’s AMS can have a significant knock-on impact on the productivity, and morale of the agency team.
The seemingly menial task of reviewing an email address in each policy stored in the AMS can become an immensely time-consuming activity. For instance, reviewing a single policy’s email information can take up to ten clicks or 30 seconds to review. When these manual review processes are performed multiple times a month, it can translate into a considerable chunk of time.
More than just the time and cost of the clicks, teams are forced to either review policy details with the naked eye or to export policy contact details into an Excel spreadsheet and work through thousands of rows and columns. This laborious process exposes the agency to the certainty of human error, including all the associated costs and frustration.
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Not only will the additional time spent clicking mean teams have less time to engage with strategic tasks, but it can take a toll on how insurance professionals perform when they are engaged in their key responsibilities.
For teams who are motivated by the prospect of engaging with potential clients or cross-selling new products to existing clients, the additional admin burden of maintaining policy contact information can be more detrimental to their performance than many leaders may realize.
Research has shown that the cognitive impact of a time-consuming and redundant task is that it can increase cognitive load and negatively affect performance.
The research showed that redundant tasks - such as multi-click administration - can "clog up" a person's working memory, causing them to remember the wrong information instead of the salient points they should focus on. This can cause sub-optimal performance and reduce teams’ efficacy when they are dealing with clients, resulting in poor performance and reduced agency morale.
[Related Topic: Slash Manual Inputs and Boost Operational Excellence With Synatic]
An agency’s AMS is not designed for bulk data edits, so when firms decide to do a cleanup, they are forced to use manual processes that involve countless clicks, checking each policy one by one.
With Synatic DataFix agencies can slash the number of clicks involved with fixing a single email address from ten clicks (or 30 seconds) to two simple clicks (or five seconds) to review and resolve all the email addresses errors in every policy.
Let’s put that into perspective. If you had a database of 10,000 policies, the five clicks, or 30 seconds, it takes to navigate and update an email address translates into 83 hours, or more than two work weeks.
DataFix allows agencies to manage errors by exception, not by quantity which means the data in the AMS can be corrected with just a few clicks, saving you hundreds of hours and many thousands of dollars in data cleansing. Once your data cleansing is automated, it doesn’t matter whether you review one or 10,000 email addresses, you are guaranteed a clean database. DataFix improves scalability and reduces cost-per-task, driving efficiencies into your business.
It’s easy to dismiss the effect of the number of clicks it takes for teams to perform their tasks. But removing the manual mundanity of work can have a significant impact on the productivity and overall performance of agency teams.
Excessive clicks indicate complex and inefficient workflows, which can slow down operations. Simplifying these workflows can lead to smoother and faster task execution. Fewer clicks means more efficient workflows, happier employees, better customer service, and increased sales. If you want to learn more about how you can help your teams spend less time on administrative data cleansing tasks and more time managing client relationships and making more sales, contact Synatic today.
