Farmers Agency Dashboard

The Farmers Agency management system is also called the Dashboard by Farmers Insurance. The Agency Dashboard is the web based portal that replaced the old terminal system.

The biggest issue I had with the Agent Dashboard with Farmers is that it frequently was down or unavailable during business hours. Sometimes it would be down an entire day!

The Farmers Agency Dashboard has many problems:

• Farmers Policy Quoting - An Agent goes in to the dashboard and quotes potential clients for auto/home insurance. They take this quote and present it to the client and attempt to get an agreement to start up an insurance policy. The quoting system however is separate from the Application system so you must go through a completely separate system to submit an application for insurance. Quotes and application rates were very rarely consistent!
• Farmers Application System - The Farmers Dashboard application process made you re-enter most of the information that you had already plugged in on the Quote System. This makes for a lot of extra work that shouldnt exist. The application system rarely if ever came up with the figure that the quoting system did. Making you go back to the client with a different amount than you originally quoted. The application system was often a long series of pages and questions that needed to be filled out to complete a policy. Compared to the systems of other insurance carriers, the Farmers Dashboard Application system is the most difficult and illogical system of all.
• Concurrent Transactions - Sometimes when submitting an application an agent will get an error called a "concurrent transaction". This error would cause your entire application and all inputted data to disappear! Applications where the household consists of multiple drivers and vehicles could take an hour or more to complete. If you were to get a concurrent transaction error, you would have to re-enter all the data again! Sometimes to even get the error a 2nd time!
• Dashboard doesnt automatically save inputted data - Other carriers save data as it is entered. The Farmers Dashboard didnt, you had to save it on your own. If you were to get a timeout on the system, you would lose your data and have to re-enter it again.
• Farmers Agent Email - The Agent email account provided by Farmers is available through the dashboard. When the dashboard went down, which often happens during the day or quite often every night after 7-8pm EST or 10-11pm MST and various times over the weekend.
• ECMS - Electronic Contact Management System? Not sure if thats what the acronym stands for but this system is also crippled too. The real purpose of it was supposed to be a place where the agent could store client notes and details about conversations. The biggest thing Farmers was pushing was to put all your client contact data into ECMS. What is the biggest problem with the Farmers run ECMS? When the Dashboard goes down or if you cant connect to it, you cant access your ECMS data. So if you didnt save your client contact information in a reliable spot, you cant even find client contact information!

ECMS and Agent Email

I understand that work arounds could easily be made for email and ECMS. I never used the Farmers Agent Email because:

1. Farmers Charges its Agents - For upgraded services like more storage, adding email accounts for staff members. Farmers Charged a monthly fee to upgrade from its basic service.
2. Unreliable connectivity - If dashboard goes offline, which happened quite often, you couldnt get to your farmersagent.com email. Really, if you're stuck dead in the water, wouldnt it be nice to catch up on some email?
3. Used the farmersagent.com email address for spam - One useful thing I found to do was to use my farmersagent.com emal account to capture spam emails from Farmers Corporate and the District Office. I seriously already knew they wanted me to sell life insurance, but I dont need to be notified of this on a daily basis.

Work arounds for ECMS? Use your own Agency Contact Management software. First off, you will need your clients contact info at your fingertips. Not just when Dashboard decides to be online. You also need to have your own copy of client contact data for when your contract as an agent gets cancelled for some stupid reason. This is so you can solicit your clients after the 1 year period ends.

Farmers Image Center

I was in the Information Technology field for 12 years prior to being an Agent with Farmers. I'll have to say that setting up Image Center to work was not an easy task! I feel sorry for anyone that isnt well versed with computers who attempt to get this thing to even work. Its sheer horror.

In theory the Image Center seems like a great idea. However the way that it is organized and uploaded is very unweildy.

What they should have done was enable you to just use a simple web upload form over a SSL connection (to prevent data theft) and just allow you to plunk down every possible document into a central location where you can afterwards, classify and identify them to the system. It would be far less time consuming and a much more logical means of managing the documentation flow.

The rule that we were told by our district also was that if you go electronic on one client, you have to do it on all of them. I cant imagine how hard it would be for agents with 1000 clients, but it could cost thousands of dollars to convert the files using farmers Image Center method.

Solution: Get a good document scanner that will scan directly to .pdf format. Organize your client base into folders. One folder for each clients name, then sub folders for things like auto, home and life. Then in the root, store contact information and such in a .txt or word document.

Storage:

• Keep scanned client files on a portable usb external hard drive and unplug it when you dont need it.
• Set up a computer to only store and retrieve client files, but do not connect it to any other computer or to the internet! Use a USB thumb drive to transfer individual files as needed to other computers for use. But dont keep mass client data stored on computers exposed to the internet.
• Network Storage - If you have a server that stores files and is secured by user access etc. You can use this as a method of storage as well, but be careful because drive mappings to a users computer that point to the files. If that user gets spyware or if their PC is compromised, someone might have access to those client files.
• The safest way to keep client files safe is to keep them as far from the internet as possible.

Ignore the Image Center, use your own method of document management. But for certain do it electronically because its much easier to manage than paper folders.

Another tip, Tablet PC's are very useful for obtaining signatures and going completely paperless. You can accept the signature directly on the form and never even have to print then scan it!