This story is the second in a series that highlights new developments in the agency management system space. Keep an eye on IAmagazine.com and upcoming editions of the News & Views e-newsletter for more.

In 2015-2016, Vertafore’s growth strategy focuses not only on fine-tuning its own tech systems, but also partnering with big names like Microsoft Dynamics, DocuSign and Birst to deliver innovation to the independent insurance channel.

Cloud-based technology enables the company to pursue “multiple solutions working together,” says Greg Wright, senior vice president of agency and carrier solutions at Vertafore. “Now, you see us bringing in more and more technologies, some of them from outside the insurance industry, and weaving them into the workflows of our products so they’re tailored toward the insurance market.”

At the center of Vertafore’s development process for AMS360 is a concept Wright calls customer-driven innovation. “It’s about putting your customer at the heart of the innovation process to really understand the pain points your users are going through,” he says, adding that Vertafore either brings customers onsite or heads out to their agencies to watch how they work, then designs solutions side by side with them.

It’s called a design partner program: “They’re actually helping us along the way as we build the product,” Wright explains.

2015: What’s New?

DOCUSIGN. Emphasizing that commitment to a customer-friendly experience, Vertafore announced a partnership with DocuSign in 2015. When using this e-signature provider, documents “show up on your phone, you scroll through, you touch here, you touch there, you’re done, you send it back,” Wright says. “It’s pretty seamless. Forms that may have taken days being passed back and forth or dropped off or emailed back now can happen within hours of being sent out.”

CLIENT PORTAL. Also last year, Vertafore launched a brand-new, highly customizable 24-hour customer support portal where agencies can place their brand front and center. The flexible, responsive Web design works well on mobile devices and desktops and connects agents with clients for checking policy limits and coverages, as well as securely sharing documents.

“Depending on how you want to use it, you can customize the tabs and the information that’s displayed to the insured,” Wright explains. “This is to help our insurance agent compete with agencies of any size and meet their customers where they expect to be met.”

MY AGENCY REPORTS. In 2015, Vertafore launched a new reporting platform that leverages Web-based APIs, making it “much faster to innovate and build out new reports,” Wright says. My Agency Reports “basically allows agencies to build out custom templates and do ad-hoc filtering on the fly, then save those templates so they have a summary of detailed views looking at the data in a lot of different ways.”

NEW MOBILE APP. In Q4 2015, Vertafore launched the new Vertafore Mobile App for Android and iOS, which provides secure mobile access to account policy, claim and billing information from the Vertafore Agency Platform. “We believe this will be a great solution for producers who are on the road, but I won’t be surprised to hear that principals and CSRs end up using it as well,” Wright says.

The app also features integration with ReferenceConnect—what Wright calls “Google for insurance.” “They don’t know something about asphalt contractors, they can look it up in ReferenceConnect,” he explains. “It’s right there in the phone; the app looks it up immediately. It really helps the producer know whatever they need to know before they get to their client’s site so they look like the expert.”

2016: What’s Next?

SALESTRACK. After announcing a new partnership with Microsoft Dynamics CRM in 2015, Vertafore just released the first version of a new product called SalesTrack—an insurance-specific sales force automation solution built with Microsoft Dynamics under the hood. The “producer persona solution” helps salespeople score and track their opportunities, and it seamlessly fits with AMS360, Wright says.

“You can customize the workflow or the number of steps in your pipeline on that Dynamics platform, so within SalesTrack it’s very configurable by agency,” Wright explains. “We’ll come out with what we think is an industry best practice in sales force automation and build in the trigger points that flow back to and keep the information synced between the management system and SalesTrack.”

For example, SalesTrack can trigger a to-do for a CSR to get a quote or submission for a policy after receiving a verbal go-ahead from a producer. “When that policy actually comes back and they bind it and download it, it also messages back to the producer seamlessly behind the scenes that the policy has been bound,” Wright says. “They can then call the customer back and let them know the policy took effect.”

For agencies that would rather use salesforce.com—Dynamics’ main competitor—Vertafore can apply the same connector that syncs data between SalesTrack and AMS360, Wright adds.

PERSONA-BASED DASHBOARDS. Another partnership—with data analytics and visualization platform Birst—will enable Vertafore to hone its prowess in the area of persona-based dashboards and data capabilities. Specifically, the company will use Verse to build an executive and producer dashboard for Agency Platform that will display top KPIs, critical performance indicators and health metrics for the agency.

“Executives have different needs than producers who have different needs than account managers who have different needs than CSRs,” Wright explains.

Unlike CSR dashboards, executive and producer dashboards are not about workflow or productivity. “It’s more about, ‘How am I doing? How is my business doing? How’s this region doing? Where am I growing or losing business?’” Wright says. “We’ll build out the data model and the dashboard interface, and then leverage the power of Verse to enable executives and producers to drill down anywhere and see a deeper level of information.”

For example, a producer might begin at the agency top line, then refine by region, then by line of business, then by a particular carrier or producer. “That level of granularity is really powerful when you’re trying to understand something that might be interesting or new, or ‘Why am I down over here or why is this line of business growing so fast?’” Wright says.

It’s a big step forward in an industry where technology solutions have “always been focused on productivity for the CSR,” Wright points out. Historically, the AMS has been “a back-office tool that is workflow- and data connectivity-based. And our strategy is, yes, that’s really important and we continue to innovate there, but you have to move on. You have to serve the needs of everybody else at the agency.”

Jacquelyn Connelly is IA senior editor.