Renewal Certificate Workflow

[bpehrs11]

Hello everyone,

I have recently been given the responsibility of handling the direct bill renewals for our agency and one of the most inefficient pieces of this process seems to be issuing certificates. Many of our clients have a large number of certificate holder and many of those require additional insured forms from the policy. We are using TAM Online and so our distribution method is limited to mailing which is somewhat time consuming and more costly. Most of the certificate holders have a fax number or e-mail address but having to print each certificate and then go through the fax@vantage workflow also seems like a long process.

I would like to know how does your agency handles this? Do you use third party software? do you just buck-up, so to speak, and do it?

One thought was to have a form letter go out to the insured to ask them to verify which certificate holders they still need but that would only solve part of the problem in cutting down on the number of individual certs but doesnt speed up the process.


Any ideas would be great!

Thank You!

[JohnGage]

It's the paper driven TAM workflow that pushed us to CSR24 for all certs.  It's great when a client is willing to issue the cert but even if the request comes to the agency we issue through CSR24.  The renewal process is great, we can actually deliver the renewal cert to the holder how they want it, paper, fax, email. 

The attachment feature for endorsements, etc.. could use some work.  The ability is there but it could be easier.

The other warning I would give is think through how you would migrate your holders from TAM to CSR24.  We ended up running a TAM report to Excel and then writing a macro to reformat as necessary so holders could be imported.

[brinkerdana]

I've used Paperport in the past in this way.  Printed the certs to PPT, then stacked them with the appropriate endorsement forms and emailed or faxed from there.   At one agency, we entered the various endorsements as form letters so policy number, term, etc could be fed from policy data.  At another, we kept a forms library in PPT and copied them into the insured's PPT folder.  Once they were all sent to various holders, they were stacked together in groups of 25 and emailed to the client and to ourselves in TAM for attaching.

A little cumbersome, but better than printing then scanning to send. 

Another option is to use Certificatesnow.com.  You can issue the renewal certs, endorsements and email, fax or mail them out.  Then either you or the insured can do additional certs as needed during the year.

[Jim Jensen]

I'm not familiar with the TAMOnline limitations and work-arounds, but would printing to PDF be any more efficient - then you can attach the PDF to an email, or fax it from there? You could have the requisite ISO forms that need to be attached in PDF and simply insert the form when PDF of the certificate opens. Not sure if any of this is more efficient or just a different set of the same number of steps.

[DebAmstutz]

If your agency has fax@vantage, it makes the sending process quite easy!

[bpehrs11]

Thank You all for you responses.

It seems like without going to a third party vendor we will have to continue to use fax@vantage or another program to compile certs.

Fax@vantage works however I feel like we have do excessive data entry e.g. didn't I just  tell my computer which holder code to use and that it is a certificate. It would be nice if fax@vantage was pre-filled based on what you just printed to it. However it is nice that unlike any third-party software it can attach to the client file.

Maybe I need to look at a different faxing/e-mail mechanism?

What about just sending all of the certs to the insured only instead of each holder? Any other ideas?

Again Thank You for your time.