--:-- Ryan Hanley: Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. Today we have an absolutely tremendous episode for you, a dynamic conversation with the man, the myth, the northern legend of the insurance industry, Jeff Roy, talking about robotic process automation.
--:-- Essentially, we talk about Jeff and his agency and what he's doing with what he's calling digital virtual assistants, or essentially using bots. The things that normally come with negative connotations because they're used for spamming or hacking or anything like that. Well, bots can also be used for altruistic purposes. In this case, Jeff is using bots to do automated and robotic processes inside his agency management system that allows people to be more efficient and effective.
--:-- It is an absolutely tremendous conversation. Every conversation I have with Jeff Roy is wonderful, and I think that you're going to love it.
--:-- Before we get there, quick shout out to the sponsors that make this show possible. The show does have a cost. It's not just time. It is capital and other things as well. Our sponsor is Podium, P-O-D-I-U-M, for all your text messages and web chat needs. I love Podium mostly because their response rate is incredibly high. When someone contacts you via text or via an online form, it is often difficult to get them back on the phone if you don't get them immediately, or to get communications flowing again. What I found with Podium is we have like a 95 plus percent contact rate. That alone makes Podium worth whatever the cost you have to pay, depending on your size. Obviously, everyone pays different. That's why I say that. So go to podium.com.
--:-- Guys, so many things going on at Rogue Risk. If you are a producer, if you are an agency principal, if you want to get into a system, if you want to get into a set of processes, into a career that allows you to grow and expand, that allows you to focus on what you do best—building relationships, solving problems, and selling—then go to join.rogrisk.com. Join, J-O-I-N, dot rogrisk.com. Go to join.rogrisk today. Check us out. If you want to be part of the Rogue Risk team, we are always hiring quality people that fit our culture that want to work in a results-based organization. We'd love to have you. So check us out at join.rogrisk.com.
--:-- And now on to our conversation with Jeff Roy.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Dude, what's going on? The man, the myth, the legend.
--:-- Jeff Roy: No, just Jeff Roy. Nobody important. What's up?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: How was your trip? I saw you were down in...
--:-- Jeff Roy: It was good. Yeah, I didn't know if you were actually back yet or not.
--:-- Jeff Roy: Yeah, we got back. We left last Tuesday and got back on Saturday. It was a lot of fun. We'll see if it's the last family vacation we ended up going on. But we had it planned and we wanted to go. I went to the Atlantis, for those listening, and it was awesome. We swam with the dolphins in 85 degrees with a nice cool breeze. You just can't beat the Caribbean certain times a year. You just absolutely can't beat it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's good. That's awesome. Great to see you get some time with your family and got to get away with the boys. Good things.
--:-- Jeff Roy: Yeah. Although one interesting part was—so listeners of the show probably know this, but I don't really do COVID or even really think about it day to day at all. Not that that's a good thing. I just don't. So you had to take COVID tests to get into the Bahamas. We took COVID tests and we get to the airport and they're like, "Those are the wrong COVID tests." I was like, "There's no way these are the wrong COVID tests. They're the most expensive COVID tests that I could find." We took them and brought them in.
--:-- The guy is giving us all this nonsense at 4:30 in the morning. The kids are whatever, 4:30 in the morning kids, and Lauren is fairly upset because here we have this trip that we've had planned for almost a year. She starts getting a little on the guy. He's going back and forth, calling the manager. Finally he's like, "Screw it. Whatever. I don't care. I can see you don't have COVID. I'm just going to put you through and whatever happens, happens."
--:-- So we think we're done. We go through all the airports. We get all the way to the Bahamas, get to customs. We just didn't think anything of it. They're like, "Yeah, passports look good. Welcome. Just all we need to see is your COVID test." We're like, "Okay, here they are." They're like, "Yeah, no, those don't work."
--:-- I would love to have a camera on Lauren and my faces because both our faces probably went bright white. Here we are in a foreign country standing in the customs line with like 1,000 people behind us. We don't have the right COVID test. But thank God we're in a country like the Bahamas. They're like, "Ah, no problem. Just go sit over there. We're going to call this person." They called some woman and they're like, "You got cash, right?" I was like, "Well, how much?" "$300? Yeah." It was like 260 bucks or something.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Dr. Nick from The Simpsons came and took your test for it.
--:-- Jeff Roy: Oh, dude. The same exact test that I took at home that I had in my bag, that I showed them. It's the same exact test. Same brand, same nose swabs, same little containers, same exact test. I had to hand her $300 cash American. She takes the test, we're off. It was one of those moments where you're like, "Oh my god, I have no idea what's going to happen here. Are they going to kick us out? Are they going to put us on a boat and push us out into the ocean?"
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I'm surprised they gave you the wrong test. Canada was one of the most locked down countries, a little different approach than the US, I'll leave it at that. Every time I went down to the US this year, up until probably a month ago, I had to get a COVID test. $40, it was a rapid test done by a pharmacist. They charged $40 to make sure it was legit. I had to get that to fly down. I didn't need something to get back, but I had to do that. I thought that was quite funny. So I'm surprised that you said, "Hey, I'm traveling," and they didn't give you the right test in the pharmacy.
--:-- Jeff Roy: So I guess what it is—and this was a mistake by Delta. On Delta's website, it says you can take an at-home test. It has to be a PCR at-home test. No problem. Take it. What they didn't put in the thing—and I was yelling at the guy at the counter in Albany, "Look right here. This is your website. I'm not making this up. It says right here, 'at-home PCR test.'" In that little paragraph, it didn't say "proctored at-home test." It just said "at-home test." So I was like, "At-home test. Great. Perfect." I bought the most expensive ones so I know I got a good one. The guys... it was just this whole thing. Thank God it all ended up working out. Everything was fine. It was 30 minutes out of our day and $300 cash American to some random woman who gave me the same tests that I had taken.
--:-- I went down to Mexico in November. We didn't have to get tested to go down, but when we got back, we had to get a test for $300 Mexican. This guy shows up and he was doing four or five tests in an hour. It was $300 US for two tests. He was going to email us the results, but he's like, "Hey man, you got WhatsApp?" I said, "Yeah, I got WhatsApp." So he sends me these $300 tests on WhatsApp. We were all good to go. I asked him how many people tested positive at the resort. He said three people in the last two months. So they really didn't want you to test positive. We didn't get COVID, we were fine, but it seemed to be a really good industry, COVID tests. Good way to make some revenue.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Foreign country COVID tests is a really good way to make some coconut. There's no doubt.
--:-- Jeff Roy: Dude, how's things going? Sorry, I'm on your podcast, I shouldn't be interviewing you.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Oh no, it's all good. Things are good, man. We're cranking along. We're continuing to get integrated into SIA, continuing to grow, continuing to hire. We're dealing with a lot of the same problems that everyone else does with scaling and systems. If I could get rid of systems issues, that right there would take 40% of the nonsense out of my week. If everyone could just get along internally from a people standpoint, that would take another 40% out of my week. Then I could get back to doing what I do best, which is generate leads and produce revenue.
--:-- Our business model is kind of unique, not wholly, a few interesting things. But for the most part, we're dealing with the same scaling issues that everyone does who tries to go fast and go digital. We've learned some really interesting lessons, but ultimately I feel very strong about what we're doing and strong about the industry.
--:-- I think you'd be interested in this. We are changing agency management systems and we've decided on Nexure. This was made the decision a week before Tarmika decided to sell to Applied. That piece of information may have changed our ultimate decision. We looked at Epic. We looked at Epic pretty hard. It's just so overpriced in my opinion versus peers. But if they're going to fully integrate Tarmika, it would have been nice to have that piece of information beforehand. Not that it's anyone's fault. A couple NDAs, I'm sure there were a few NDAs that I couldn't tell.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It kind of got launched right. I do feel like everyone should just feel like they have a mutual NDA with me no matter what and tell me all the inside dope. I think that's the way it should be. But unfortunately, the universe doesn't agree.
--:-- Jeff Roy: So we went with Nexure. I am excited about that. I really like what they're doing. I like their platform. They're kind of under the radar because they mostly deal with networks and MGA wholesalers, but they have a very robust retail platform that a lot of big shops are on. I'm just excited to get off of NowCerts where it feels like one step forward, two steps back all the time. We just need something that we can count on. That was a pretty big decision that we made to move to Nexure. We're excited about it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Well, nice. Congratulations. We're doing our due diligence right now. We just looked at Epic. We had the Epic people in. We're finishing our conversation up there. We're still on TAM. Actually, we did an interview with Taylor Rhodes last week for the Digital Insurance Pint podcast. We got a lot of good stuff that he shared with us. We had heard prior, and he confirmed, they're going to be discontinuing TAM in 2025. Partially because some of the software they built it on for Microsoft is not going to be supported anymore. It's been around for like 30 years and a lot of these only support one vertical.
--:-- I've been pretty impressed with how Taylor's come in there. He didn't have any dirty laundry and he's kind of changed the culture. Applied greatly—he's still got some work to go, but he's made some big changes there and really opened up their system, made them more PC versus the Apple world type thing. They've got some good stuff going.
--:-- In Canada, we don't have a ton of choices like you do in the US. We kind of have Acturis or Power Broker. Keo has been bought by AMS 360, they haven't really done anything on the platform in Canada with AMS 360, so I'm not sure what's going to happen with their long-term plan. Obviously Applied. We got a few other ones, TBW custom software, a few other ones off to the side. There's not really a ton of options in Canada. I know you've got a lot more in the US. You got Hawksoft in there. You got a few other ones that we don't have. NowCerts and some other people.
--:-- It's kind of a debate: Are you a CRM? Are you an AMS or a BMS? What are you? Sometimes people start off as a CRM and then they start integrating backwards. It's a bit of a murky field from my observations. You would know better than me, Ryan, when you did all your research. What are your thoughts on the crossover between CRM versus AMS, BMS, and people trying to get in each other's lanes or expanding?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I don't understand why it's so difficult to build a CRM out of an agency management system. It doesn't make any sense to me. I think in large part, it has to do with legacy technologists and vendors making tactical decisions around product and they never sold an insurance policy in their life, which is why it hasn't happened.
--:-- I still believe that Applied Epic is the best agency management system in the game. I honestly believe that. If you want the most consistent, it's going to work, it's going to do everything you need it to do, you're going to have good support. I think Epic is the best. But the price point is bananas. I look at the price per user, and then if you want any of this other functionality, everything comes with an additional price. You look at the stacked cost and you're like, "Jesus, this is borderline enterprise-level Salesforce installation." I'm assuming there's justifications for the price. I just couldn't. It feels like a handcuff. It feels like too big of a handcuff to me.
--:-- Jeff Roy: A hundred percent. If your AMS is getting into three, four, five percent of your costs, that's very costly. When you get bigger, obviously that number goes down. But the amount of our costs for our AMS and BMS have gone up. Has the productivity efficiency improved? I would argue we haven't gone a lot better in the last 20 years. I would argue it's gotten worse because we've had portals dumped on us. As technology got better, we've had to do double entry.
--:-- If you start taking all your virtual assistants, all your robotic process automation people, all your staff, all your data entry people, and you look at how many policies your account managers are really handling, you're going to get a rude awakening. If you compare that versus five, ten, fifteen years ago, it's probably not that much different. But look how much the cost has gone up.
--:-- I feel like we're at an inflection or tipping point. As you master the scales, I always talk about inflection points of when things are going to tip. I think we're maybe at a point now where a lot of data can move better. They have newer databases. You don't have to retype stuff five times because it's actually smart enough to display it the right way. We're starting to see some changes. Hopefully over the next two or three years, we get all the benefits that we've already paid up front for. We've been paying more money than we really need to pay to help build these products for everybody in the future. Hopefully someday we can capitalize on them. Anyway, that's a nice little tangent.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: To be honest with you, that was what we came down to. I've looked at AMS 360 a bunch of times. While everyone from Vertafore who works there that I love and I appreciate you as humans, it is a hard pass for me on AMS 360. It doesn't seem like there's a real vision for the product. It still looks like Windows 97. Standard functionality and everyday usage is seen as... I just don't know who is driving product build-out for them. It doesn't make any sense. I don't understand their strategy. I don't trust that they understand what agents need in the new environment. For all those reasons, we kind of threw them out almost immediately.
--:-- I don't want nothing to do with Salesforce AMS anymore. I did almost a year's worth of diligence on that and decided very strongly I'm not interested in Salesforce as our AMS. I looked at NowCerts. Hawksoft is just way behind on integration and cloud development. The fact that they still haven't figured out how to go fully cloud shows a lack of either disposition or ability.
--:-- That brought us to Epic, Nexure, and Better Agency. I really like what Better Agency is doing. In the last 12, maybe even six months, they've made major, major improvements to be a player. If I'm one of the top 100, am I thinking about Better Agency? Probably not. But if I'm a 20-person or below agency with a large personalized book, say anywhere between 50 to 70 percent, I'm taking a really, really long look at Better Agency today. I wouldn't have said that a year ago. But today, we did ultimately, for a few different reasons, they're just not ready. We needed to make a move off of NowCerts. If I had another year, I probably would wait and watch and see what happens with Better Agency. But we just didn't have a year.
--:-- NowCerts was failing us. Cost benefit announced, so that kind of cut them out. That left Nexure and Epic. We did three different demos with Nexure. This is not—I have no interest in them other than they're a vendor. They're not a sponsor or anything. I'm not trying to pitch them. Their functionality... the one drawback to them is they're kind of old school in how they integrate. They have a wide open API with full function kit, but you've got to pay for it. You have to build the integrations yourself. They have some integrations and then the rest you have to build.
--:-- That being said, I looked at and sent their API dev kit to a couple of people I know who are developers. They said it's not going to be a high cost. It's fairly robust. So what we decided was, we'll get into Nexure. We'll start to see what functionality we need and then build those custom integrations as necessary. Hopefully it's just a few. That's how we got there. Excited to make the move. I'm also very nervous too. Excited, also very nervous.
--:-- Jeff Roy: Be careful what you wish for, right? You can do all your due diligence, but implementation is hard. You always hit that—I call it the valley of despair—where you hit the very bottom of your implementation and then you start going up. But the training and onboarding has gotten better by the vendors. A lot more people have gone through different items. There are people that have blazed the trail. As long as those trails are good, you should be in a good spot.
--:-- The one thing I liked about Epic is their new browser base looks really good. The fact that you can run an AMS through your browser of that level was quite interesting. I saw a demo of it. That's pretty neat. It can really reduce your costs, makes it more Salesforce and other CRM-like. It'll be interesting to see everything play out.
--:-- With Tarmika and their sale to Applied, it'll be interesting if you get a lot more connectivity with them, or does Tarmika bring a lot more connectivity over to Applied? I feel like that's what's going to happen because their commercial thing they launched last year at Applied had a grand total of five companies on it. It wasn't overwhelmingly amazing that many people had signed up. Now Tarmika, depending how they're going to integrate it with Tarmika and Indio—are they going to roll that together into some kind of superpower thing? It'll be interesting to see if Tarmika has legs to stand on its own. It remains to be seen.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I really, really, really hope that Applied allows Tarmika to continue to make and improve integrations with other platforms. I struggle with why they would allow that to happen because if they could just push Tarmika strictly down into their own user base, they would triple or quadruple the number of agents on the Tarmika platform. But you never know.
--:-- I've been a huge proponent and I'm so happy for Ragoff and the entire team—Chris, Geetha, Pat, Lauren—all the people that have been there for the last two, three, four years. They've done a tremendous amount of work. They've been a bellwether for integration in our industry, especially integration with carrier rating systems on the commercial lines side. In the annals of history of the insurance industry, I feel like there'll be at least a paragraph on Tarmika and its impact on our industry. For all that, I'm very happy for them. Very, very selfishly, not being an Applied user, I'm concerned. But we'll see. Nothing will happen quick, and anything that does happen, there'll be plenty of lead time. If we do lose access not being an Applied user, there are other players.
--:-- Jeff Roy: Remember Taylor and his team. They've got Google engineers. They've got money. They've got scale. They can probably do things if Tarmika is the right direction they want to put it on, accelerate it, or use it as a catalyst to increase things quicker. They can put it on steroids and really fast track it if that's the right direction. Is that going to be integrated with Indio? There are a lot of things. I'm sure they'll be able to map it out.
--:-- We had PolicyWorks in Canada. Applied bought PolicyWorks. It wasn't as robust as Tarmika. Tarmika was built on new technology. PolicyWorks was—I wouldn't say old as the hills—but it was like an early 2000s product that needed a makeover. But it was the best way to get all your data in one spot, put a nice PDF, and send it by fax or email. Some companies had APIs to upload into it, not a ton of them. They just didn't quite go down that path. Applied is trying to redo that whole program. It'll be interesting to see where they go with the PolicyWorks makeover, or if they just roll it right into Epic. My guess is they'll roll it into Epic and all the PolicyWorks stuff will move in there. It'll be interesting how Applied pulls all this together. They've got a lot of tools, a lot of expertise that they've been able to buy in certain areas. We'll see where it all shakes out.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The interesting part for me too is that I don't ultimately think that comparative rating is the long-term best solution in commercial lines or even in personal lines. I think the way comparative rating is set up today is more reactive than it is proactive. What I actually think the solution to placing business faster with the appropriate carrier is knowing where the business goes without rating multiple carriers. That doesn't mean you shouldn't rate multiple carriers. But I think rating multiple carriers is a byproduct of not knowing where the business should go. If you know where the business should go up front, then you only need to quote one carrier and can place that business faster, more accurately, and more efficiently than if you're doing comparative rating.
--:-- If I comparative rate among 10 commercial lines carriers, am I going to be able to most likely find the most competitive price within a few percentage points? For sure. But I'm still rating 10 carriers. I still probably need to bridge some of those carriers over to the main platforms, get validated rates, et cetera. If, on the other hand, I can learn over time as I place business and as I rate where certain lines of business in certain geographical areas for certain industries go most often and are placed most often, then I can have a system that actually recommends 92% of the time: "This line of business in this state for this industry is placed with Hartford. Just quote Hartford. There's no reason to quote anybody else. The best you're going to get is a percentage or two point difference in premium. That doesn't matter. Just go to Hartford."
--:-- That's what we've done for 450 years as humans mentally. We play that mental game. We do that all day. But when you're doing this at scale over a large geographic region, it becomes very hard. That's why I think moving it up to the front of the system is ultimately the solution. But that has to be built and no one seems to want to build it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What's up guys? Sorry to take you away from the episode, but as you know, we do not run ads on this show. In exchange for that, I need your help. If you're loving this episode, if you enjoy this podcast, whether you're watching on YouTube or listening on your favorite podcast platform, I would love for you to subscribe, share, comment. If you're on YouTube, leave a rating review. If you're on Spotify or Apple iTunes, et cetera. This helps the show grow. It helps me bring more guests in. We have a tremendous lineup of people coming in—men and women who've done incredible things, sharing their stories around peak performance, leadership, growth, sales—the things that are going to help you grow as a person and grow your business. But they all check out comments, ratings, reviews. They check out all this information before they come on. So as I reach out to more and more people and want to bring them in and share their stories with you, I need your help. Share the show. Subscribe if you're not subscribed. I'd love for you to leave a comment about the show because I read all the comments. Or if you're on Apple or Spotify, leave a rating review of this show. I love you for listening to this show. I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoy creating the show for you. All right, I'm out of here. Peace. Let's get back to the episode.
--:-- [Interview resumes]
--:-- Jeff Roy: I'll give you an example. When I first got in the industry, we had manuals. We had four companies in the office and you had to go grab a book and calculate everything by hand. Back then, you had a piece of paper, you wrote it out—we didn't have any computers at that point, I'm dating myself here—but you knew which company to place it with because you knew who was hot. You had that in your head. Your head was the AI.
--:-- Now, I like your idea, but you need some AI and machine learning to be able to direct you to the right company because companies are changing their rates and changing things. We used to get one manual update a year. Now we're getting one change every two or three weeks, every month. They're tweaking things. The regulators are letting people file a little bit quicker, file and use. Things are moving so quickly. What's good this month can change by next month.
--:-- As you know, you actually get 900 carriers. We've got maybe 100 to 200 carriers, probably really 100 legitimate ones in Canada. It's just really hard to know who's writing what, where, when, and how. I think the raters are going to be there for the simpler stuff. The value add is: just because the rate comes out at $1,000 for CAA and $1,200 for Intact Insurance, for instance, you have to explain what the difference between the companies are. Why we're different as agents and brokers than all these direct guys out there is we have a lot of shelves. We have a lot of products. We can offer a lot of options. All these other guys are one-hit wonders. They've got one product. They've got very small stuff. If you want it quick and easy and you don't care who you are, great. Go with one of these directs or insurtechs or direct writers. But when it comes down to having real problems, that's where the broker and agent comes in. That's where we need technology to shop it and find the right match. But again, we have to know why you should be with this company.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Why Traveler is the right one for your business over some other company. Right. So.
--:-- Jeff Roy: Yeah. Well, the answer to all things is you just sprinkle a little AI on it and then you're good. That seems to be the way. You just do this thing, put a little AI in there, and then everything's fixed. No problem.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It's the cayenne pepper of nowadays.
--:-- Jeff Roy: Exactly. I got a friend, Sharif from Truffula. I'm not sure if you got a chance to meet with him or if he's ever on your podcast.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: A long time ago, I had an intro call. You introed us.
--:-- Jeff Roy: Yes. He's got a product that can tell on renewal if you're with the right company. He gives you a red, a yellow, and a green to tell you if you're leaving premium on the table or if the client's at risk. He's using AI to compare all the people in that territory and the driving profile. He's kind of built something to what you've said, more on a renewal basis, not an upfront basis. Obviously, the more rates and the more people that go into his database, the more reliable it is. When you mentioned that, I thought of his new tool through Truffula. He might be a cool guy to have on one of your podcasts down the road to learn more about it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, that'd be awesome. That's kind of your hands in the tech game. Now, I never need an excuse for us to chat because I love our conversations. But I actually reached out to you. The whole impetus for this podcast was Quandary. I had an agent, a woman from either North Carolina or South Carolina—I am sorry if you are listening to this, I can't remember your name. When you see me in person, you can punch me. We had an awesome conversation. During that conversation, she mentioned she was doing some due diligence on this tool, Quandary. She said it's kind of sold as bots built specifically for your AMS for a specific task or set of tasks. They act almost as digital virtual assistants because they perform this task. It sounded kind of familiar to me. Then I scrolled down and saw Excalibur Insurance. I thought, of course Jeff is involved in this project. So I reached out to you and said, "Hey man, what's going on?" And you said, "Why don't I come on the show and we can talk about it." I'm not necessarily looking for you to sell us on Quandary, but I'm super interested in the concept of a digital virtual assistant and bots in general. They have negative connotations. Maybe we could talk through that. I'd love your thought process around this tool, how you're using it, the technology in general, and we can go from there.
--:-- Jeff Roy: Okay, perfect. Where do you want to unpack?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Wherever you want to start.
--:-- Jeff Roy: That's a good way to look at it. There's so much, I don't even know where to begin. A lot of people think that bots... One of the most interesting things when I talk about increasing profits and making our insurance brokerage more human, people go, "How the heck can you use a bot to make something more human?" I explain that the best thing is we get the bot to do boring, mindless activities that people have to do over and over again. We get our people doing the high-value activities. For an example of mindless activities: our staff, when all the electronic document interface and ADI data exchange comes in every day, after the downloads are done, our system isn't smart enough to label them properly. Our team has to go into every single e-document and rename it—"2020 Camry" or "2021 Audi"—so when we put it on our CSR24 app, we can find it easier. We were spending probably 25 minutes renaming all our attachments and invoices. The automatic document invoicing just does a generic "auto insurance." I can't tell you what vehicle it's invoicing. We were spending 25 minutes with 10 people a day doing this double-entry data entry. It wasn't the best use of time.
--:-- One of my friends from Saskatchewan had found the Quandary guys and was using them for Epic to do this exact task. Brock, a long horse, a super guy. I trust him. I thought, "Wow, if he's using it, this is the real deal." We hooked up with the Quandary guys, Jackson and Jameson—they're the two brothers. They hooked up with us. I thought, "Can a bot really do this work for us? If it can, it can free my people up a ton of time." That got me super intrigued. We saw a demo back in September or early October. We actually saw a videotape of the bot going in. I thought it was a human doing it, but it was a bot. This bot can do the work at three o'clock in the morning. It was able to go in and do that. We signed up, took the leap of faith, and put seven or eight thousand dollars down to develop it. Within a month, we were able to get this bot working. Our bot is doing a bunch of really cool stuff.
--:-- To flip it over to you, Ryan, why would you want to use a bot? You want to replace anything that humans are doing that they don't need to do with technology. A bot, once it's trained, can do it reliably every time. Our humans are great, they do a super job, but there are typos and mistakes. The bot does it perfectly every time. It can optically scan a dec page, take that information, and type it into the system. That's how smart it is. It's pretty cool.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Okay, so my first question—and maybe this is not the right place to go, but you just let me know—what does "properly trained" mean? When you say you deploy a bot and it's properly trained, what does that entail? What does that actually mean?
--:-- Jeff Roy: That's a great point. Once you sign in the line and get set up, Jackson and Jameson will sit down with you and their team. They'll actually watch the process. We got on a Zoom call, walked them through the process, recorded it, and explained what we were doing. They understood what we were doing so they could figure out how the bot could actually do it. Once they understand that, they have special programmers back at their company who are experts. They take that information and build out the bot. Part of the process for us is we have double-factor authentication. We had to set up the bot to log into our system using dual factors, so it had the same security as a human. We had to get that all set up, get them into TAM, get them a license, and set them up as an employee in the system. My wife Una came up with some cool names. Our one bot is called Bailey's, the other is called Jameson's—she's Irish, so we named them after two great Irish drinks.
--:-- Once they figure out your process and understand it, they build the bot. They come back and show you, "Hey, here's the bot working. Is everything working okay?" You try it. Once everything's good to go, you launch it. To give you an idea, once these bots were set up, our process before was that we had a staff member at home at 6:00 or 6:30 in the morning logging into EDI. We didn't even realize she was doing it at home, having a coffee, starting the process before she got to work. Sometimes it would take an hour, an hour and a half, sometimes two hours to run the EDI and the ADI. Now at one o'clock in the morning, the bot goes out, logs in, does all the EDI. We redid all our night utilities. It goes out there and does our EDI process. Part of the EDI process, it's smart enough to go in there, match those clients up, and attach the files or anything that's not attached properly into the system. It does a lot of stuff. After that's done, it will go in and rename all the invoices and rename all the attachments. Bingo, it's all done. By 7:30 or 8:00 in the morning when our staff comes in, all that work has been done for them. They can get at the job of contacting clients, doing protection reviews, upselling, cross-selling, getting referrals—the stuff that humans are really good at, building those relationships and connections—while the bot does all the mindless work behind the scenes.
--:-- That explains how you set the bot up and how it gets working. You're probably looking at a three-to-four-week period. That period is going to be reduced. The good thing about Quandary is they're working with a bunch of different BMS and AMS systems in both Canada and the US. When they start building bots and master one of the BMSs, they can hook up the next person that much easier. Over the next number of months, it's going to get faster and more economical to sign in and get the bots as they build these out over time.
--:-- There are a lot of different uses for a bot, Ryan. I don't know if you've thought about the different uses. That's what I was using it for originally, but there are a bunch of other things you can do with bots. Do you want me to go over that?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yes, I would love that because my mind is spinning. I'm thinking about... Could these bots... I really like the term "digital VA" for some reason. Now, this is robotic process automation. I'm actually talking to a company right now that I call a digital virtual assistant, where I can actually talk to it and it can answer the phone, go into a database, do quotes, and capture all the information. This one doesn't talk to you live. I use this as robotic process automation, but it can replace some of the tasks that your virtual assistant does, thus freeing up your virtual assistant to do more human tasks. A digital virtual assistant would be somebody that's got AI and natural language processing where they can talk to you back and forth. That's how I delineate it. I only know of one company that's close on that front, and I'm in conversation with them. They're a company called Koyos. There's another one called FloatBot or something. There are a few companies getting into that space. Nobody's really nailed it down, but that's the new frontier. It's chatbots on steroids. Imagine a bot smart enough to answer questions for your own staff internally, but also hook up to your phone and your website, communicate with your clients, and tap into your AMS or BMS database through an API. Imagine that. I just want to distinguish what a digital virtual assistant is in my vocabulary. This is robotic process automation. I didn't want to get too mixed up. Does that make sense?
--:-- Jeff Roy: It does make sense. So the robotic process automation, let's stay there.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: RPA. Let's stay on RPA. So you have Jameson, right? Jameson's role is the process. Or maybe it's Bailey's, whichever one. Can they do one process or one set of processes each? Or can you have them work multiple processes? How does that scale? If I had five different major tasks that I needed done through RPAs, would I have to have five different bots running them? How does that work?
--:-- Jeff Roy: Sometimes a bot, depending on the process, one bot can do multiple steps. Sometimes they'll create a new bot. We have a bot that does closed day right now. It logs in and runs closed day. Some of that stuff is built into newer BMSs or AMS. We had a person physically doing that. So the bot will log in at five o'clock, run closed day, and it's done. One less task. The other thing is, some brokerages are massive. They may need two or three bots doing the same thing. They might have to divide and conquer. If you've got thousands and thousands of files to go over, you might have two or three bots doing the same process to speed it up. It kind of depends on the situation.
--:-- Some ideas of how you can use bots: EDI, which I already talked about, works great. Renewal revision comparison—the bot can go in and compare premiums, coverages, limits, deductibles. It can extract information from the customer profile and present it back to your team via an activity in the AMS, saying, "Hey, here are the coverages. There's a difference. This renewal is missing flood coverage, or your sewer backup limit dropped to $20,000. Did you realize that? I can do the checking for you." That's called renewal revisions. PDF naming, which I've talked about. One of the things we're looking at right now is carrier portals. I was talking to Bradley Flowers and I fell off my chair at how bad it is down in the South. He has to go into four or five portals to get a rate. His companies don't even provide APIs. They're not in the comparative raters because they're probably scared that somebody might move business. It's a very 1942 attitude. But that's where they're at. He has to go in there. You can get a virtual assistant to go in and enter it, but this bot can go in. We're working on one right now in Canada to do portal entry. If you watch my Digital Insurance Pint, we have the shirts: "Just Say No to Portals." I hate portals. Double entry if I'm doing it multiple times. It's so inefficient in an API world. Our industry is losing millions of dollars because work has been dumped on us by our insurance companies, and we've never been able to reclaim it back. The bot is a way to reclaim it back until we get these APIs built to connect and our BMS vendors actually pick up the torch and connect with our companies, which is starting to come a lot more. Tarmica is doing work on that right now. That's only going to get better.
--:-- For portal entry, you'd be able to type the information in, get a price, and bring it back in. The bot could do those kinds of activities. Certificates of insurance. There are a lot of different ideas. Anything that you're manually doing or a VA is doing, you can generally train a bot to do it. It's a whole different concept, but it's definitely something you're going to need to use in your brokerage or agency. If you can replace something with a bot and it runs every time, I always joke that as long as there's not a power outage or a cyber attack, it's going to work. Your VA? Well, you could have a typhoon go through and take out a bunch of VAs. They could get eaten by a tiger tomorrow. They could leave your company. You have to retrain them. VAs are great. We have a VA, Kenneth from Puerto Rico. We use Agency VA. They've been great for us, and he does a lot of great tasks. But there's some stuff that robotic process automation can do better, faster, easier, and more consistently. It's nice to be able to bolt that onto your agency or brokerage to improve the experience.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Knowing who our audience is, I think it is fair to ask: are there any contractual or legal issues with deploying a bot inside your agency management system?
--:-- Jeff Roy: We have not had any. I know people have had problems with virtual assistants. It's our agency. You can get a rogue employee. How do you guard against that? They can steal data. We've had no issues whatsoever. We've told our companies about it. The ones we've shared it with thought it was really cool. The bot is secure with double-factor authentication. There's no way of getting it hacked any differently than our staff. That's why it was important that we had the double-factor authentication to get in. I don't want to log into anything without that. They were able to accommodate that, no problem. I've had no issues with it. But let's be honest, if it's different and people have to actually think about it, it's way easier for people to say no than to say yes. That's been my experience because they actually have to think and learn it. Oh my God, forbid somebody has to learn a new idea and figure that out. A lot of people don't seem to want to be growing and looking at stuff like that. So they say no. But there are a ton of people using this right now. It's helping a lot of agencies and brokerages. It's starting to spread, and a bunch of Canadians are getting onto it. As the product gets more and more people through it, it gets better. Quandary has been a great company to deal with. I found them awesome. Jameson and Jackson Frugo are the owners. They're two young entrepreneurs, very customer-focused, and they have great people skills. A lot of times you deal with tech companies and they have no people skills or it's really tough to communicate with them. They've been fantastic. I've been very bullish, and we've been very happy we made the move last fall.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. To be honest with you, my mind is spinning with possibilities. I think about things like rounding out accounts. One of the things we deal with, especially with the volume of inbound we get, is we don't write whole accounts most of the time. We solve whatever the initial problem is. Then we go back through a week, two weeks, a month later and round out the rest of the account. Like all things with humans, you don't have time, you don't get back to it, you forget. The first thing that came to my mind was if we had an RPA constantly running in the background, pulling out the accounts that need to be rounded out, that have round-out potential based on different factors. Maybe even the ability to go out and get quotes in certain systems for certain lines of business. Like an automatic EPLI quote pull for everyone who doesn't have EPLI, pulling back and pushing out even automated emails with quote numbers and, "Hey, we're estimating you at $2,200 for EPLI for the year. Is this something you're interested in?" You still need the human salesperson to sell it. You still need the human salesperson for respect, trust, rapport, service, and relationship. That is inherent and will be an inherent part of our business for the foreseeable future. That being said, this whole idea I started of a human-optimized agency—it's things like RPAs which allow for the optimization piece of the humans. This isn't about replacing humans. The point is to allow humans to spend more time in the places where they do the best work. I know you are always on the forefront of that. When I saw your name associated with this company—and it may even be cool to have one or both of the founders on at some point if they'd be interested—I'm just very interested in this concept.
--:-- Jeff Roy: 100%. I'll get Jameson and Jackson. I'm sure they'd love to be on the show. I'll definitely hook you up. They can go a lot deeper than I can. My day job is still an insurance brokerage owner. I understand the technology from maybe a 5,000-foot level. I can figure out how to deploy it and what it should be doing. If things go off the rails, the good thing about them is I stayed out of it. My team—Una and her team of account managers—work with them directly. I stayed out of the project. I wanted to make sure we build capacity, and they did a great job. They really didn't need me at all. There were a few things we had some issues with, like our night utilities and the bot. That's nothing to do with our team. It's just, "Hey, these are things that created new problems that we had to work through." A few times the bot didn't work. We had a bad problem with CSIO, which is like your ACORD. It would be like your Ivans for download. We get all our downloads from CSIO, which is owned by the industry, whereas Ivans is owned by Applied. They went to upgrade their mailboxes, and everything went bad. We lost downloads for almost a week. In our world, we live off our downloads. Almost 98% of our stuff comes in through an e-doc with electronic data pushing it in. That's how we work. We don't get any mail, very little mail anymore. If we do, it gets scanned and built into our process. We lost that for almost a week. We had to shut the bot down and start doing it manually. We had to play catch up. Those are the only blips. The odd time something will happen weird. Maybe a night utility thing didn't work properly and the bot couldn't operate because a file was locked. We built a process to make sure we cleared everything. Some things will pop up. You can't set it and forget it, but after a while it gets more and more consistent. There are some great benefits for your agencies and brokerages.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Are we going to see you or Jeff and Una or just Una down in the States at any conferences or anything in the next bit? Any fun appearances down here in the States?
--:-- Jeff Roy: Yeah, I'm heading down to Nashville for the conference down there. Applied in October. That should be good. Dave and the guys. I haven't been down to IAOA since 2018. I did the keynote down in Arizona. COVID has kind of kept me away. Yeah, I'm going to head down there. I'm trying to get an article together for Chris Paradiso's magazine. I'm a little behind schedule, so I need to get going on that. We're heading down there. We haven't planned a ton of stuff. I kind of do two or three things a year. Una and I have limited our speaking to make sure we stay focused on our business. But if anybody wants to learn about robotic process automation, I'm doing a 30-minute presentation where we talk about how robots can make your agency more human. Most people are going to go, "What? More human?" But once you hear it—even listening today—can you see how if you can free up your people to connect and build that loyalty and build relationships with clients, it's way better than having them type stuff over again? Mindless work that people dread to do. Let them do stuff they love to do. Come into work and do what you like to do and what you're good at. Doesn't that work a lot better for you?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It's certain. No doubt. Where can they get that webinar or presentation? Is there some place they can sign up to watch it or listen to it?
--:-- Jeff Roy: It's at the IAO. Unfortunately, it's at the IAO convention. But if there's some group that wants it—I did one for Jason Cass's group, Agents Intelligence. We came on there and talked about it. Jason had scheduled us for five minutes. I thought, "Five minutes?" Once we got into it, I had Jason Cass's mind spinning afterwards too. The more you think about the art of the potential, the sky's the limit with what you can do with it. But you have to look at, "Is this worth doing? Is there a business case?" Believe me, I like technology, but it's got to have a good ROI. It's got to save my people time. It's got to make them more efficient. It's got to allow them to do stuff that's higher value activity, or I'm not interested. I've had enough shiny objects where I was sold one thing and found out quickly it wasn't there. I'm a little more seasoned now when I look at tech. This tech has been great. This is one of those things that our agency loves and has made a big difference. I'm excited to see how this portal entry bot works. We're building out a prototype right now with five or six other brokers in one of my insurance groups here in Canada. If I can actually do portal entry, wow, that'll be huge. Unfortunately, I thought it was called single entry or STP, where I press the button and it automatically goes into the portal with no double entry. We don't have a ton of companies that offer that. We've got three or four companies now in the Guidewire system that are integrated with Applied. We get a code, put the code in, and bingo—we don't have to retype everything. That's where things are going. We are a long way from ever getting there en masse in the industry. There are a lot of companies that don't get it. They haven't built the APIs. I've been saying the word "API" for probably eight years before most people knew what it was. I want to see that when I leave, by the time I retire from the industry, I want to make sure that connectivity is there. Agents and brokers can connect and they don't have all this friction. They're not trying to figure stuff out. They don't make five phone calls and waste time looking for stuff. It should be two clicks away in seconds, not minutes and hours.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I couldn't agree more, man. Jeff, thank you so much. It is always a pleasure. It's always a whirlwind. There are a few people pushing hard into the space and making decisions—not just chasing shiny objects—making decisions for the right reasons, testing stuff, and being willing to share it. I just always appreciate your time, man. I know you're busy, and it means a lot to me and to the audience that you are willing to share so much. Thank you.
--:-- Jeff Roy: Great to talk to you again. It was great seeing you in Cleveland at RockCon. It had been like almost two and a half years.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I know. I feel bad because for two and a half years, Una and I could not get down to the US. I felt kind of left out, like I was missing the party and all the cool kids were hanging out. Let's be honest, you can go to all the Zoom calls you want, but it's actually talking to people after the conference, having that beer. I know somebody that had a beer with a certain somebody that ended up selling their agency by having a beer after a conference. It's about making collisions, getting off your ass, going out meeting people, and having that conversation. That's where the magic happens. It doesn't happen sitting back in your office, never reading or listening to anything, doing the same thing over and over again. I really appreciate being on the show, bud. It's been good to see you. Hopefully we'll see you sometime at some event soon.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I hope so too. You're the man, bud. Be good. Take care.
--:-- Jeff Roy: Take care.
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