Good Info From Companies You Don't Currently Write With - add each to TAM?

[Sara Lieser]

We have information from various carriers that we'd like to keep handy even though we may not have quoted or written business with them.  (They may have a markets for things that our other carriers do not.)  We are trying to decide whether to group this information under a "miscellaneous companies" entry in TAM or give them each their own code immediately. 

How are other agencies handling things like this?

[Lance Bateman]

We only add as they come into use - either by appointment, or from a broker.  Otherwise, just clutters up the list

[brinkerdana]

Until we write something with them, we keep them as contacts in Outlook and use categories to sort by type of business written, ie: Tech, Contractors, Special Events, Gun Clubs, etc.  That way we can find out who writes what pretty easily.  We also do this with our regular company contacts since there are so many different departments/undewriters for business specialties.

[Jeff Zylstra]

I like Dana's idea, but it might be somewhat limiting unless the Outlook data can be shared easily among everyone.  I use either a spreadsheet to categorize the companies, or if I have e-mail messages, I save them as .MSG files in a "markets" folder.  That way, all the files are shared and searchable.  Not perfect, but it's simple, flexible and does about 98% of what I need.

[Jim Jensen]

I"m trying out a new software title that may be good for this - Evernote. It supposed to let you pull in PDFs, clip from webpages, plus other docs and you can organize them in folders. Not really much different than just putting them in Windows folders, except that it allows you to synchronize between machines - smart phones, PCs, iPads, etc. and some shortcut options to do it.

Free version and paid version. Saw demo of it by Steve Anderson on Thursday. Could be helpful. It's tied together with an online account, so you may be able to tie several users together if you use the same account.

[Jeff Zylstra]

Another thought might be to use paperport.  It will allow you to classify files and search for them based on this classification.  It will also handle several different types of files.  The limitation is that it's usually a single user product.  Not sure if you could store files in central location and have different users search the files using PaperPort or not.

[Sara Lieser]

For those agencies who use a place other than TAM Companies, do you find that you have a data sprawl problem?  Company info in too many places and staff who can't find what they need?

[Jeff Zylstra]

For those agencies who use a place other than TAM Companies, do you find that you have a data sprawl problem?  Company info in too many places and staff who can't find what they need?

An excellent point.  We don't have an issue, simply because we're a smaller agency.  A larger agency with more than 4 CSRs is going to have this issue.  Add in multiple locations, or segmented duties of CSRs, and your probability multiplies.   

[Sherry Burrell]

I know nothing about Paperwise, but do you have to have a TAM account to set up a folder in Paperwise?  Could you set up a prospective companies folder with sub folders for the carrier and copy the info there?

[Jim Jensen]

I just used OneNote for the first time. It's part of Office2010 and functions pretty much the same as Evernote that I mentioned in an earlier post. It has folders and notebooks that you can organize, plus you can annotate the items.  It has a "shared notedbook" option, which would seem to indicate that you can share it with other users. I see that Evernote also allows sharing of notebooks. Either one of these could be interesting option. Evernote doesn't have the licensing costs that OneNote may cause.

A print driver is set up on the computer that it can directly send the document to OneNote. Safeco has documents for their claims that can be viewed and printed, but I couldn't get them to save properly. I found that I could print them to OneNote, then save them as a PDF or Word file from there.

[Sara Lieser]

PaperWise has integration with TAM including the Companies list - we use a hotkey and PaperWise takes info from TAM and fills it into searchable fields for us.  Because of this integration, we index it to the company entered in TAM. We had the freedom to make whatever index fields we wanted so that categorizing and naming an item right is easy (and naming things right makes them incredibly easy to find) and I do like the controls that PaperWise affords us (wait, I sound like an advertisement).  While it is possible to index items in PaperWise without associating them with a TAM company code, I don't want to make any unneeded exceptions to where and our data is filed - it becomes hard to find. 

I guess my debate will simply come down to whether to add a "Miscellaneous" company for these carriers we don't write with or add them each under their own code.

We are also about to start a clean-up of company codes so I see the problem with entering a code for every carrier who's name comes across your desk...ack!

I think I just answered my own question....miscellaneous code in TAM; that code and name will carry over into PaperWise.  And because of how our system is structured, once we do write with one of those carriers it will be easy to enter a code for the carrier and reindex documents to it.

Thanks everyone for your help!

[brinkerdana]

I like Dana's idea, but it might be somewhat limiting unless the Outlook data can be shared easily among everyone.

We use a Public Outlook Address Book which everyone has access to. 

I liked the set-up for when I had to market an unusual account.  I could change the public address book view to Categories, type in the description and it would pull up all the companies and contacts for that class of business, including companies we had appointments with and those we didn't.  The first time I used this set-up, it was with a cluster agency with 8 agencies and 40 users.