Change the Way Your Agency and Agents Track Commissions
Problem
Your agents are your most prized assets, you value their expertise and experience, their excellent customer service skills and their ability to make clients happy. Every day they successfully navigate multiple booking channels, tools and systems, but it’s when they come to track their own sales and commissions, that they face difficulties.
For many agencies, providing visibility to incentivized agents on bookings, commissions and trends is a challenge. It often requires agents and finance teams to constantly go back and forth, monitoring, allocating and communicating commission statements, all the while, removing your agents from servicing clients.
The lack of visibility to an agent's targets, commission payments and allocations can be detrimental to success and at best can be a huge time consuming task, involving both agents and finance teams.
Solution
graspAGENT: Imagine a simpler world where your agents have complete transparency and visibility to their sales and commissions. Imagine a self-service platform for agents which removes the back and forth of commission chasing and statement requests. With visualization at their fingertips, agents can review and reflect on their business, easily assess targets as well as view unpaid and unallocated commissions.
graspAGENT is a self-service platform specifically for agents, which reduces the back and forth around their commission information requests.
With a fully transparent view of statements, commission incomes, as well as unpaid and unallocated commissions, agents have real time view of their success.
Let’s discuss a case of an agency that has solved for this: Cruise & Travel Experts.
Background on Cruise & Travel Experts
Cruise and Travel Experts offer customized vacation travel services and business travel solutions. The Michigan headquartered agency offers cruises and land packages for the leisure market as well as services for the business traveler.
For many years, Cruise and Travel Experts have enjoyed using graspAGENT in support of their outside agents. Each of their agents can view their activities, invoices and sales. Reports can be run directly from graspAGENT or emailed directly to the agents. Their agents love seeing the interim statements, a quick snapshot of what is coming in their next paycheck.
Previously they found that they were getting many requests from agents on:
Whether or not commission was received
When are they getting paid
How much they are getting paid
Unclaimed commission
But what were some challenges with the product? The product worked really well with outside agents but that functionality did not transfer to inside agents. Inside agents couldn’t see their interim or finalized statement. For agents that have internal incentive programs, they didn’t have that same visibility. However, recent developments have now changed that. Both inside and outside agents have the benefits of seeing all activity and their statements.
Tom Baumann, president of Cruise & Travel Experts, had this to say about the functionality:
“Now that we have the total functionality for both inside and outside agents, it has changed our lives and made it so much easier, our accounting team is thrilled that they no longer have to spend time manually providing this information to our inside agent team and the inside agents are thrilled they can now access their own information whenever they want to, it’s been just a wonderful addition to our business flow!”
Example of graspAGENT dashboard
With graspAGENT, the amount of time the accounting team needed to provide to agents greatly decreased and the agents were empowered with the visibility on the commissions. It became a DIY portal. Agents can get copies of their statements, on demand. And there was also the ability for agents to claim unclaimed commissions.
Example of graspAGENT commission statement
Results
As part of the graspAGENT onboarding, the back office configuration is optimized so that the agent reconciles with industry standards (closing the period, all payments applied, etc). So there is potential benefit even before graspAGENT is online.
The platform makes it easier for the agency by providing visibility to agents without consuming back office resources. And with less time needed to uncover the status of commission payments, your agents (inside and outside) are doing what they do best, serving customers and driving sales.
Do you have the tools to make your inside and outside agents, and back office team happy?
Look at graspAGENT today and experience the difference. Check out the video and request a demo now!
