Thanks to input from Hylant's Debbie Fischer, Pam Tanner, Sue Larkins, Dawn Heckerd and more, we present a case study on how the agency has rolled out Indio among its teams, and how project leads continue to support the integration.
Background
Headquartered in Toledo, Ohio, Hylant has been in business for more than 85 years and is home to over 800 employees in 20 offices across eight U.S. states. With upwards of 18,500 clients (made up of Commercial, Surety, Personal, etc.), the team sought Indio in order to establish a better, more automated process for collecting information, especially when it came to the Middle Market/Complex Middle Market space. At the time of this writing, Hylant has been on Indio for almost two years, a move that came about during the pandemic when process failures were magnified amid a period where employees found themselves working from home.
What other problems could Indio help Team Hylant solve? For one, leadership was interested in finding ways to improve the response time from clients, as well as to improve the value of the data provided. The team loved the idea of everything being in one place, as opposed to have multiple back-and-forth emails that were attempted to collect necessary information. Furthermore, Hylant sought Indio to help improve the renewal experience for staff. Although year one did not see significant change, by year two, the new tool (present day) has started to provide a significant improvement.
Implementation
Though technically still in process, here is a high-level look at the phases of the project for Hylant:
- October 2020: Pilot
- June 2021: Commercial Lines rollout
- November 2021: Small Business rollout
- Current/Under Review: Personal rollout
To implement the above plan, Hylant determined that it would use the following tools with clients: workbooks, forms, eSignature, documents and "request to upload" forms, primarily for the renewal management process. A few teams also elected to make use of Indio for new business opportunities, though that has not yet taken off dramatically. Internally, Hylant identified the following tools for rollout: Epic integration/syncing, activity (to see clients' progress), policy data integration (two-way); smart reminders; and, email integration. At present, the team is not using the Epic integration to download documents because they feel that the function needs to be built out more in order to allow users to rename documents and/or associate them with corresponding activities in Epic.
Next, Hylant set up an implementation task force that stayed close to the project from beginning and makes themselves available to field questions, troubleshoot and support training needs on an ongoing basis. The task force has been able to be extremely responsive, which has helped overcome the typical frustrations that often coincide with technological change.
As rollout progresses, Hylant will continue to consider ways to make use of Indio, optimizing where it can based on what the platform offers and is capable of doing, along with continued improvements with Epic integration. Overall, the team's approach to implementation is continuous and ever-evolving, and they hope for the integration to continue to help solve problems, especially when it comes to preventing users from deleting documents or renewal submissions.
Results
After rolling out Indio to the largest departments mid-year in 2021, Hylant saw 235 active users through the platform, 587 renewal submissions sent and 81 submissions sent to market. And, to date in 2022, the team has seen: 235 active users (of which 130 are client contacts), 590 renewal submissions sent and 60 submissions sent to market.
Lessons Learned
For agencies and brokerages considering Indio, here are the Hylant team's top tips, tricks and lessons learned:
- Tighten Communications – This was key for Hylant internally and definitely a major win for the team handling rollout. At all levels — client, service, sales and leadership. The more team members knew about and understood the tool, the more they could support client understanding and the better things went.
- Create a Trainings and Video Demonstration – Internally, Hylant established live trainings for renewal on Indio, office hours and a roundatable session for all offices. Extenrally, they produced a 9-minute, client-specific video that demonstrated the platform, leading to ease of use among clients and helping to introduce the platform.
- Take Advantage of the Activity Tab – Make sure you use the activity tab in order to provide more visibility into client progress.
- Set Reminders – Take the time to use smart reminders in order to eliminate the need for manual follow-up.
- Be Persistent – After a while, it dawned on Hylant that clients who hadn’t responded to renewal requests in the past were now responding, so persitence 100% paid off.
- Market With Clarity – Many clients who teams perceived as not open to new technology were found to demonstrate a willingness to adopt use of Indio. The more clear your marketing is at clarifying ease of use, the better adoption will be.
Eventually, with stronger integration between Epic and Indio, Hylant is confident that Indio will lead to improved data integrity where application detail is concerned. And, for now, they are happy to report an improved renewal management process that is more streamlined, more automated, more user friendly and more transparent (especially for critical team members and clients).