AgencyBloc
The Definitive Insurance Agency Management Solution

Robert Burns, Chief Product Officer

This is where AgencyBloc makes a difference.

AgencyBloc’s agency management platform helps life and health insurance agencies grow their business with a suite of industry-specific solutions and services, including Sales Enablement, Quoting, Client and Policy Management, Commissions Processing, and more. A collaborative approach to solution development enables it to replace clients’ archaic systems with tools that meet their specific needs at their desired price point. Over the years, the company has incorporated numerous clientrequested features into its platform, integrating niche capabilities as opposed to building a generic product.

“We're fond of saying we're the number one recommended agency solution. That's not just a clever tagline. We have thrived with all agencies and have an incredible retention rate due to our capability to listen to the customers,” says Robert Burns, chief product officer, AgencyBloc.

Identifying the Needs of the Insurance Sector

Insurance agencies typically utilize disparate solutions for their day-to-day operations, including solutions for sales enablement, primary and noncontributory (PNC) benefits, lead gen marketing, and customer communications, making it difficult for brokers to consolidate all the data. During the quoting process for group and individual benefits, which involves a comparative quoting and enrollment process, moving data between key systems also becomes complicated.

With AgencyBloc, every life and health insurance agency can access the features they need to organize themselves, communicate with clients and prospects, and grow their business. It helps clients define distinct sales enablement capabilities for the platform, tailored to their specific needs. This is crucial to bridging functional gaps in an organization. It also allows clients to dramatically reduce the time spent on manual data entry and quickly find the information they need.

AgencyBloc’s industryspecific CRM enables users to manage prospects, clients, and policies, including enrollments and elections, agents, carriers, coverage type, payment information, enrollments and elections, and agent information from a single location. It integrates with many enrollment platforms, allowing agencies to focus on their sales. This level of efficiency cannot be achieved with a generic CRM solution.

Solutions for Every Requirement

At a macro level, the AgencyBloc platform provides incomparable visibility into an organization. Users can assign tasks to themselves and incorporate important notes and attachments. All “to-dos” can be sorted and filtered by status and due date to help users prioritize their work. Everything can be routed through an automated workflow to assign activities based on preset criteria. Users are also able to create workflows based on lead form submissions, client and policy activity, and agent license renewals. With AgencyBloc, agencies save hundreds of hours a month and thousands of dollars in resources.

AgencyBloc’s commission module is specifically designed to help insurance agencies of all sizes accurately and efficiently track and process commissions. It can import carrier files, reconcile and identify inaccurate payments, and split and calculate payments using its proprietary processing tools. Processing time can be reduced by 75 percent, and users can quickly identify any missed commissions from carriers.

The commission module enables users to analyze and report on commission data to understand the agency's productivity. They can get high-level insights with realtime dashboard analytics and dive deeper with custom reporting. Using this information, agencies can track and monitor important KPIs and provide guidance to producers based on performance.

We're fond of saying we're the number one recommended agency solution. That's not just a clever tagline. We have thrived with all agencies and have an incredible retention rate due to our capability to listen to the customers

To up its ante, AgencyBloc recently acquired FormFire with the specific intent of solving the issues in the quoting process. FormFire is wellestablished for automating the manual process of questionnaire-based underwriting. AgencyBloc is now leveraging that same capability and expanding it to community rating and ACA products to improve broker results.

“On average, we found that the brokers spend in excess of 15 hours supporting a single small group annually,” says Burns. “About 40 percent, or six hours, of that is in the marketing phase alone.”

This effectively makes the broker a victim of the agent, as they sell the same old product. It strips them off their ability to explore and suggest additional products or lines. With its new acquisition, AgencyBloc can offer a single platform for small groups with more tools and insights to enable the broker to improve performance and attract and retain more clients.

As a solution provider that works closely with the insurance community, AgencyBloc chooses not to be all things to all customers. It is focused on the specific needs in the life and health insurance space, solving a broad array of issues beyond its agency management capabilities, including sales enablement, quoting, and managing relationships within the distribution ecosystem.

The company’s dedication to driving clients toward success has enabled it to pen a vast collection of success stories. One of their most recent collaborations was with Brystra Insurance Services, an insurance services company located in California and New York that specializes in employee benefits.

Brystra wanted to be able to present themselves in a professional manner to their contracted agents and other partners, combine both their CRM and commissions processing, and enable their agents to see their individual books of business and commission statements. They also needed a system with a support staff that would be easy to work with and contact.

AgencyBloc’s easy-to-use software, tiered agent pricing system, and tracking capabilities were a must-have as Brystra continually hires new agents. The ability to combine both their CRM and commission processing into one platform was invaluable, and the individual support from AgencyBloc’s client success team made the transition and onboarding easy. Everyone at Brystra Insurance Services always felt like AgencyBloc made time for them.

In the words of Brystra CEO and Co-Founder David Bryant, “When we started with AgencyBloc, we were looking for someone to grow our business with. Six years later, they’ve exceeded that expectation. They continue to be a partner that helps us build our profitability through their services.”

In a space divided between vendors that look specifically at benefits and those providing more generic agency management capabilities, AgencyBloc stands unique. It plans to expand beyond the current average customer profile in terms of options to serve an extensive clientele.