10. How Can the Agent Experience Be Improved?
What we saw in 2011: “Agents can be blamed for a poor experience caused by the insurance carrier -- which doesn't help anyone.”
What happened in 2012? Agents got a lot of new toys from their insurer partners in 2012, including iPad apps and social media assistance, to help modernize the career and bring it more in line with consumers' expectations of how they want to interact with salespeople. But perhaps the most enduring sign of insurers' commitment to their agents this year was the formation of the ID Federation, an insurer/vendor/agency partnership that aims to corral the problem of proliferating passwords by introducing a single sign-on standard.
Progressive's Jim DeVito wrote in an op-ed for Insurance & Technology this year that the federation will "benefit independent agents by moving them from the sticky note nightmare of managing multiple password protocols to a simple, secure logon, no matter which carriers or vendor solution they use."
