Lowering the cycle time and increasing placement rates for selling long term care insurance policies can result in immediate bottom-line impact for brokerage general agencies and the carriers they represent.
Advisors struggle daily with the frustration of using different forms and administrative procedures for different carriers. This ultimately drags out the cycle time of the sales process. Such hassles can make the LTC insurance selling experience exasperating for agents and clients, causing some producers to question whether they should even sell LTC insurance.
The good news is that solutions are being developed to simplify the quantity and complexity of the paperwork bottleneck in today’s LTC insurance industry. These solutions can help encourage increased sales production by streamlining operational processes and create more consistency to eliminate the frustrations that people in the industry currently face.
LTC insurance lags behind other segments of the insurance business in standardization because it is still relatively young compared to other insurance areas. Property and casualty carriers have been using standardized forms for several decades. The Life Insurance Forms Working Group of the Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development (ACORD) also has been developing standardized forms for several years.
As the LTC insurance industry moves on the road to standardization, some questions need to be considered. These include:
1. What are the successes and disappointments for other insurance industry segments that have moved to standardize forms?
2. How does the LTC insurance industry draw from the practices used in other lines of insurance?
3. What can the LTC insurance industry do to help this movement towards consistency?
To facilitate the process of moving to standardization, the Long Term Care Forms Working Group was formed in 2006 under ACORD to address these questions and help make a start toward the industry’s overdue need for universal data standards and forms.
Based in Pearl River, N.Y., ACORD is a global, nonprofit insurance association with the mission to help the development and use of standards for the insurance, reinsurance and related industries. ACORD standards and services improve efficiencies and expand market reach. Hundreds of insurance and reinsurance companies, as well as thousands of agents and brokers, related financial services organizations, software providers and industry organizations worldwide are affiliated with ACORD.