eDocs — aka Activity Notes — have had a positive effect throughout our 22-location brokerage headquartered in Nova Scotia. Brokers’ overall satisfaction is very high.

With eDocs:

1.Brokers access documents faster than they could prior to eDocs. Declaration pages usually attach the next morning after being transacted by the carrier, so brokers see the declaration pages almost immediately on the TAM customer. 

2.Documents are clear and easy to read. 

3.Documents are easily e-mailed to the customer. 

4.The volume of inquiry calls to underwriters is reduced, thanks to documents being on the customer file right away. (Our brokers do not use the carrier portals except for billing purposes, as we believe they need to spend time on customer contact and not on learning every carrier’s portal.)

5.We have reduced time spent on opening, sorting and scanning mail, and we use that time in other, more meaningful areas.

6.Our carriers have shut off the broker copies, saving a lot of trees.
 
Brokers considering switching to eDocs should carefully study the feature’s impact on workflows. Also, look at each carrier’s options for transaction types, and plan on how to handle them. One of our smaller carriers is a bit more advanced and can send us billing notices, but TAM does not have a related specific transaction code, so all billing notices go into suspense. While the process is still faster to attach to the customer than scanning, it’s still a nuisance. Also, Applied has followed the CSIO standards very tightly, and the same carrier has created an issue with respect to the effective date of the policy not matching. I continue to solicit this carrier to try meeting TAM’s matching criteria so as to reduce the suspense file created.

I look forward to some of our other smaller carriers also implementing eDocs. I believe enhancements can also be made in TAM to make the process more efficient, and I will continue to solicit Applied to make the process even better.         

Rodney Munro is a member of ASCnet’s Canada Interface Committee. He is vice president of Operations at A.A. Munro Insurance Brokers, based in Whycocomagh, Nova Scotia.