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Accuracy and visibility are vital in maintaining a motivated sales force and rolling out new products.

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AT&T PROVIDES NETWORK SERVICES FOR PROASSURANCE

Insurance customers won't tolerate difficult navigation, endless loops that prevent transactions or other Web site challenges, according to survey results released by San Francisco-based Tealeaf Technology Inc. The survey, conducted by Rochester, N.Y.-based Harris Interactive Inc., indicates about nine out of 10 consumers conducting transactions online (within a number of industries) have experienced problems. This year's survey highlights online consumer intolerance, as 42% of those who have experienced problems when conducting online transactions switched to a competitor or abandoned the transaction entirely. Additionally, 52% who experienced bad customer service from a company's contact center following an online issue stopped doing business with the company as a result.

Agencies that have not begun to embrace enterprise content management and workflow may have already missed the boat.

A routine, "fit-for-purpose" data assessment helps carriers plan wisely.

LIBERTY UNVEILS COMMERCIAL PRODUCT

Thanks to new technologies, carriers are unearthing fraud such as "rent-a-patient" schemes and physician upcoding.

It's no secret that the insurance industry takes a relatively dire view of regulatory compliance. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) is reported to have cost public companies across all verticals $35 billion last year. If the popular press is correct, that equates to 30,000 man-hours per company, per year, to comply. Although it's a given that promoting accurate bookkeeping (not cooked books) is simply best practice, the only companies seeming to benefit from compliance efforts are the pool of compliance-related technology solution providers.

Adding metrics to customer touch points results in agency's ability to increase first-call closes and improve overall sales.

You can't hop into a cab, step into an elevator or walk down the street without passing someone using a Blackberry, iPhone or other type of mobile device. Business professionals, students, police and even your kids are connected every second of the day. As a result, more and more carriers are recognizing the inherent value of mobile technologies as a productivity tool, and have embraced this technology.

Viewed from afar, the claims process has not changed markedly in many decades. Despite new technologies being leveraged in many aspects of claims, for too many insurers, the claims process as a whole remains a manually intensive, inefficient business process-one in which even experienced adjusters find themselves mired in paperwork.

Analytics isn't a new concept, but considering the way insurers now use it, it may as well be. Where once fraud was the issue to enter insurers' minds when they heard the term analytics, they have now found more ways to use this technology. One approach is to employ text analytics, which often uses natural language processing (NLP), a subfield of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics, to convert unstructured data into valuable, structured data.

Dayton, Ohio — Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. has been recognized for its innovative use of technology across and beyond the business to create and sustain highly significant and quantifiable business value, according to DM Review magazine and the Teradata Corp., division of NCR, a Dayton, Ohio, data warehousing and business intelligence technology provider.

In a new 68-page report entitled 'BPO Opportunities in the Property & Casualty Insurance Sector,' analyst John Willmott finds that P&C insurers perceive themselves to be in a mature and highly competitive industry where process cost reduction and continuous service improvement are viewed as far more important mechanisms for achieving improvements in competitive positioning than process innovation.

Fairfax, Va. — The National Association of Independent Life Brokerage Agencies (NAILBA) announced the appointment of Thomas A. Kirke to the 2008 Executive Committee. Effective Jan. 1, 2008, the NAILBA Executive Committee will be filled as follows:

Washington – An extension to the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA) has passed the U.S. Senate. The measure was approved by unanimous consent. The original TRIA was passed in wake of 9/11 and is set to expire on December 31.

Tropics Software Technologies announced its new Director of Software Development, Robert Sillett. Sillett will concentrate his efforts on the new Tropics .NET platform. He has teamed up with the Tropics system designer and recruited consulting help to build a robust .NET architecture for the upcoming versions of Tropics software.