Insurance

Case Study: Gowrie Group and Applied Analytics

Published: July 09, 2019

Gowrie Group is an independent agency with retail and wholesale offices throughout the East Coast of the United States. With roots in New England, acquisitions and growth helped the company to expand its footprint, yet also complicated the agency's data and its ability to get quality reports on the team's progress. After reviewing several options, the staff decided on Applied Analytics.

By my own assessment, we had an overly complicated process for reporting on monthly, quarterly, year-to-date and year-over-year metrics. We were also running multiple reports in slightly different ways, due to differences in download capabilities, billing management and coding from department to department. Ultimately, we realized that, while reporting templates had been created to ensure consistency, there was room for error in the execution and interpretation.

The average time for a quarterly report to be completed had drifted to almost 30 days post-close in some areas, and the results provided to the executive team were varied. Applied Analytics promised to offer simplified dashboards to analyze metrics on retention, productivity, sales performance and insurer relationships. By implementing this solution, Gowrie Group found that the Applied Analytics team helped us to put the tool to good use... and quickly. After an initial review of the codes that were in use within Applied Epic — with a great deal of focus on the line status codes — my team made a few changes to their processes in order to align with the way the system would interpret the data. There was a certain amount of data cleanup that had to be done in order to get the best year-over-year results, but the process was less onerous than a normal conversion implementation.

We really found that the Applied team did most of the heavy lifting for this implementation: They mapped our codes and told us their expectation for what the codes would mean in Analytics. Then, we made some changes to their assumptions, asked some questions and did our own cleanup. In the end, the process did not require the same time and effort that conversions have needed in the past, and we found that we got better results more quickly. The tool allowed us to use the structure of the Applied Analytics dashboards as the basis for our coding, and our reporting up to the executive team. Once we knew how a line status or activity code would be interpreted, we removed some variations that had been in play and we got better numbers.

As an agency, we ran side-by-side reports out of Epic in the first months to compare results and found that the numbers matched up consistently. Then, we continued to run cleanup reports to look for any missed or misused data fields and find the process relatively simple to identify issues within the Applied Analytics tool.

Eventually, we had some new producers working in Epic and it was during that time that we saw spikes in the number of clients in Analytics. Because of our tracking, we were able to review the codes that were in use and see that there was a need for retraining. Correction of the coding brought the Analytics results back into our expected range.

With each dashboard, Applied Analytics asks a particular question, provides detail about where the results are coming from, generates links to show the top clients or policies reflected in the KPI being measured, and offers the ability to filter and save favorite layouts and metrics.

Ultimately, we found that the basic questions we needed to answer were included within the product out of the box. For ease of use and implementation, this solution was a great decision for the Gowrie Group team.