The 5 Characteristics of a Best-in-Class Agent Portal

For maximum convenience, you’ll want to ensure that your portal:

• Loads quickly

  A small but impactful thing, following best practices when it comes to web performance optimization to ensure your pages load quickly and display in the web browser will go a long way in building trust with agents.
  
  

• Supports a keyboard interaction model

  Because wizard-based processes are form heavy, anything you can do to make filling out forms easier and more efficient for users, requiring as few keystrokes as possible, will greatly enhance usability. 
  
  

• Prefills data, when possible

  Because independent agents are working with multiple carriers across platforms, filling in data can become especially tedious and time consuming. Pulling in as much 3rd party data as possible to get data entry to a minimum can greatly improve the agent experience.
  
  

• Employs good information density

  especially for advanced users. While it might not always look pretty, agents want to see as much information as possible in one view to avoid too much scrolling back and forth. You want your pages to be as dense as possible while still being readable.
  
  

• Supports single sign on

  so agents can use existing Google or Microsoft sing in as their portal credentials, eliminating another hurdle to accessing your portal.

To ensure consistency, you'll want to make sure your agent portal:

• Implements a design system

  so that no matter where different users go in the portal they have the same, consistent experience. This will help ensure that even as you add new features and functionality over time, the experience remains seamless.
  
  

• Follows established conventions

  for different user roles. Defining user roles from the outset of the design and defining the features and data each needs to support their role in the sales and marketing process will be key in creating consistency across each role and across the platform as a whole.
  
  

• Provides high quality out-of-the-box defaults

  that meet best-practice usability standards and are aligned with the business requirements. Focusing time on designing good views and flows out-of-the box can limit the need for customizations requiring development resources

A configurable portal:

• Enables role-based access

  to custom dashboards, information and workflows to accommodate the needs and access levels of different user roles, from principals and producers to CSRs (LOBs).
  
  

• Enables configurable workflows

  based on different user roles, giving site administrators the ability to establish custom access and set up custom workflows based on user roles.
  
  

• Allows for self-administration

  empowering business users to easily configure the site for different user roles without requiring development resources.

A consultative portal:

• Provides in-context guidance

  to agents, educating them on things like a carriers’ rules for what is eligible and ineligible, the kinds of business the carrier wants to write, and on insurance products in the local market.
  
  

• Issues immediate feedback

  on errors/issues to help ensure agents include all the correct and necessary information the first time around and address any issues in real-time as they are working through the quoting process.
  
  

• Coaches and trains

  agents and other staff as they are using it, helping them understand new products and how to successfully work with a carrier, ultimately reducing the learning curve for new users and enabling greater autonomy.
  
  

• Reinforces and communicates

  why a quote did (or did not) work out, motivating users to quote the carrier again and improving efficiencies next time around.

In order to foster this kind of collaboration, you'll want to make sure your agent portal:

• Helps people at the same organization work together

  by building in functionality that allows multiple users in different roles work on the same quote or customer profile together.
  
  

• Enables in-portal communication

  by allowing users to share data, status updates, and to prompt and communicate within the platform.
  
  

• Empowers users to create robust customer profiles

  that provide detailed information about customers, providing all the information any level of user would need about the customer to successfully perform their job.

A final note

Don’t mistake comfort with a portal for quality.

 Many agents will report that a portal experience is good, or at least not bad, because they are used to it and don’t want change. Leaving things here, and calling a portal “good enough” ignores the fact that a better designed portal that is intuitive and easily learned will provide a big boost in productivity in the medium to long term, not to mention the increase in sales and retention that could be won by adding additional functionality and features that elevate the experience.