Proposals in Applied TAM

[DustinV41]

Fellow agents,

I work at an independent insurance agency and we have used the Applied TAM system for 20+ years. As many of you know its getting a little long in the tooth. I (personally) would like the agency to, at least, upgrade to EPIC but it doesn't appear to be in the cards for now.

Here is the problem: our proposals in TAM are not great. The Word template(s) we have are drab and the formatting is all over the map. Sometimes you go to insert a PDF from a carrier and it causes previous pages to go bonkers due to formatting and/or section breaks and/or who knows. The problems can lead to our account managers (CSRs) taking days to complete a proposal, and like I said before they end up boring if not ugly.

Obviously there is no "one button" fix for this but if anyone who has experience with proposals in TAM has any suggestions (or even a template, if I should be so lucky) please let me know. The only thing Applied has offered to do is to upgrade or pay for their "Applied University."

 

[Al3x Lee]

Ah, good ol TAM. Our agency upgraded from TAM to Epic a couple of years ago. Unfortunately as far as proposals goes, it's not much better. It still gets loaded in a word document, we have applied university, wasn't any help. You call them and they don't know how to program it either. As far as I can tell the easiest way to get it done is to hire an outside company that has experience doing it to format the proposals. Epic has some preloaded ones but only for certain lines of coverage and they don't look great.. insurance software is far behind the times

 

[Markthebroker]

The only thing Applied has offered to do is to upgrade or pay for their "Applied University."

Oh yeah, that's the goto response in our industry I get whenever anyone has a poorly designed system. Probably the same in most industries. Something along the lines of "Our system is great. Everyone loves our system. You just need training" Basically instead of spending several thousand dollars to update their system and make it user friendly, all the agents across the U.S. have to spend a collective total of the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars in man hours in training and workarounds.

 

[DustinV41]

Ah, good ol TAM. Our agency upgraded from TAM to Epic a couple of years ago. Unfortunately as far as proposals goes, it's not much better. It still gets loaded in a word document, we have applied university, wasn't any help. You call them and they don't know how to program it either. As far as I can tell the easiest way to get it done is to hire an outside company that has experience doing it to format the proposals. Epic has some preloaded ones but only for certain lines of coverage and they don't look great.. insurance software is far behind the times

This truly is an untapped market for any programmers with insurance experience: proposal software/programs. I'm sure all of the mega-firms and carriers hire companies to create these type of programs for them.

 

[Al3x Lee]

This truly is an untapped market for any programmers with insurance experience: proposal software/programs. I'm sure all of the mega-firms and carriers hire companies to create these type of programs for them.

Insurance people don't understand computers and computer programmers don't understand insurance hopefully that gap gets bridged one of these days...