“The best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry.”
—“To a Mouse,” by Robert Burns.
In agencies where most associates wear multiple hats, projects can be delayed or forgotten. In my medium-sized agency (20 associates strong at the time of publication), that’s exactly what happened with our client portal initiative.
When I joined my agency in 2016, we were still using Applied TAM. At that time, our commercial lines team used CSR24 for certificates of insurance and evidences of property, but we did not promote the capabilities to our clients. With the exception of a handful of insureds, it remained an internal tool. We transitioned to Applied Epic in late 2018 and continued to use it exclusively for proofs of insurance.
In 2023, wanting to better leverage the platform for clients, our agency principal gathered a small group of associates representing different perspectives from the agency: herself as principal, the office director and de facto IT liaison, a commercial lines associate and a personal lines associate. Over the course of a couple months, we completed the optimization process in conjunction with Applied Systems. This largely involved a series of meetings where we updated configuration settings, or made decisions (big and small) on what we wanted our clients to see and have access to on their portal page, such as:
- Will we allow clients to use Applied Pay to make payments through the portal?
- Will clients be allowed to issue their own certificates of insurance, or only reprint already issued ones?
- Do we have a color scheme in mind?
Unfortunately, the project stalled after optimization, and we never rolled it out to our clients. Fast forward to 2026, and we could still probably count the number of non-employee users on our hands.
Factors that Lead to Stalled Implementation
Our failure to get this project over the finish line wasn’t from a lack of desire.
We wanted to have the portal as a tool and resource for our clients.
We wanted to facilitate and modernize their experience, not just as a marketing tool for us but to make insurance more accessible to them.
Looking back, our challenges were multi-faceted. In our smaller agency, most of us were account managers or otherwise involved in day-to-day client interactions; implementing the portal was an endeavor above and beyond our assigned roles. No one person clearly owned the project, none of us had project management training and it was easy to set it aside in favor of the daily grind.
We also lacked formalized workflows that could be tweaked for the addition of a client portal — we were running into a “chicken or the egg” situation:
- Did we roll out the client portal and figure out the logistics as we went along, risking a disruption to the client experience?
- Or did we go through the (painful) process of setting up workflows and processes that would support the portal for a more seamless experience?
Creating the structure for the portal seemed overwhelming. We had tools like Applied Marketing Automation (AMA) but rarely used them, especially on a global customer scope, and integrating them into any process was an additional challenge.
Our next steps boiled down to one thing: where did we want the discomfort of growth to come from?
The Resolution
Ultimately, we opted to break the client rollout into smaller pieces and chose to develop workflows first. We broke it down further by focusing on the workflows of commercial lines renewals and held a brainstorming session on what the perfect renewal would look like. Personal lines renewals were already very automated, and the biggest win would be a consistent process on commercial lines.
I referenced session materials and handouts from Applied Client Network webinars and Applied Net sessions, reviewed Applied University’s Applied CSR24 trainings, and drafted a new workflow that incorporated Renewals Manager, AMA and the client portal. We opted to go with report-triggered, activity-based workflows that contained tasks clearly delineating the various steps in a renewal. Steps could be skipped if not necessary, but all critical steps had an associated task that were configured to roll-out at pre-determined points in the renewal process.
Our internal roll-out was slow, initially starting with a six-month testing period with only two users. If it was going to break, we wanted it to break without crashing the entire commercial lines team. We provided the team with the Applied University training that I had taken, walked them through setting up the portal and how to make items client accessible. One of my personal favorite tools is the “Client View” through CSR24, and I was sure to show my colleagues that as well.
To support client awareness, we set up a campaign within AMA that would send information to our clients once an account was created.
Where Are We Now?
I’d love to say that everything went swimmingly and it’s been sunshine and rainbows and we’re a brand-new agency. That’s not quite the case, but honestly? We’ve received a lot of positive feedback.
That being said, we’re still in the early stages of our initiative, and have not yet expanded our roll-out to include renewal new business or personal lines. We haven’t had a full year of client feedback. And, of course, there’s the challenge of selling a structured process to employees who are used to doing it their own way.
Processes are never fully set in stone and require reflection and revision, especially as Applied expands offerings and increases integrations. Ask me again in a year and it’s entirely possible we’ll have completely overhauled this again (though, for my sanity, I hope not).
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