Top 5 iPad Apps for Insurance Agencies

At Cantiani Insurance, with the recent hire of our Social Media Intern, Meghan Fearon, we decided to invest in an iPad for the company. Over the past three weeks, we have discovered the major benefits of the iPad to our Worcester MA Insurance Agency. The usefulness of the iPad has definitely proven its worth to us as we learn the ins and outs of this powerful, portable, mastermind!

The Apps that have been designed for the iPad, particularly speaking from the insurance business standpoint, are very useful and appropriate for our agency. There are over 400 Business Apps for both the iPad and the iPhone! We have read the reviews and purchased a select number of these Apps that we use on a daily basis. The App Store gives ratings and reviews for each and every one of the Apps, which is necessary in the selection process for purchasing and/or downloading them. One of the great offerings from Apple is that some of these Apps are free to download and use, and yes, they are actually FREE, not just a trial version that is going to expire in 30 days! Many of the free Apps are incredibly efficient and sometimes even better than the Apps that cost a small chunk of change!

We wanted to share our experience with this touch-screen wonder so that others can benefit from its impact on their insurance agency or business, and to hopefully further their interest in these technological advances as they prove to enhance our everyday business practices. We have come up with a list of the top 5 Apps for our insurance agency to share with you! Let us know if you agree/disagree/ want to know more!

The Top 5 Apps for Our Insurance Agency:

1)      Dropbox:

• As many people are realizing, the storage capacity on the iPad is actually not an option! Since many of us are treating our iPad as your average COMPUTER (which it was not designed to be…) the demand for storage capabilities is incredibly high. The Dropbox App is an easy solution for storage issues and best of all, it’s FREE! There are two steps to downloading this App: you have to download it on your desktop computer (which doesn’t have to be a Mac!) and on your iPad from the Dropbox website. With this download you get 2G of free storage. In simplistic terms of usability, files saved to the Dropbox are available on both your desktop and your iPad, and if edits/changes/deletions/etc are made to any of the files while working on your iPad for example, those changes are immediately made to the files on your desktop. If for some reason you use up the 2G of space, there is an option to pay for more space.

2)      QuickOffice:

• At the mere price of $14.99, with an overall App store rating of 3 out of 5 stars, this App is definitely worth the infinitesimal investment! Many of the files that we would like to open on our iPad, for example from e-mails, are in a Word or Excel format, and QuickOffice allows you to not only open and edit these types of files, but also create them! This App in conjunction with the Dropbox App greatly expands the usability of the iPad at our agency!

3)      TeamViewer:

• After downloading an App for $8.99 that was supposed to allow us to easily remote in to our desktop computers didn’t work out, we decided to do some more research and found TeamViewer, a FREE App! This is another App that you have to download on both your desktop (laptop or PC) and on your iPad, but it is worth the few seconds of your time! TeamViewer gives you remote access to your desktop from your iPad or to your iPad from your desktop. It is so easy to use and it works incredibly well! There are 2 things that are necessary to use this App: (1) the TeamViewer program has to be open on your desktop (just minimize it to get it out of your way!) to get remote access on your iPad and (2) every time you exit out of the program on your desktop and/or start a new session, you are assigned a new password (which may sound annoying, but it is a security function of the application!) Before July 12^th, we were using the iPhone version of TeamViewer on our iPad, but since Apple is continuously upgrading and designing new Apps for its customers, the iPad version is now available and even better! And it’s still FREE! This App is so useful especially if you are on the road a lot and need to access your desktop computer back at the office!

4)      Good Reader:

• Sometimes on the road there is a need to read huge PDF, PowerPoint, or text files, and with Good Reader this can be done! This is a $0.99 App and it is has an App Store rating of 4 out of 5 stars by over 1,000 people! It can integrate with your Dropbox or other storage means, such as Google Docs. One major feature of this App is that it formats PDF files to the size of the iPad screen so you don’t have to get lost in the document by scrolling left, right, diagonal, or wherever! There is even a text search option that allows you to type in a word or phrase that you are looking for within the document! This app even handles audio and video! Files can be transferred to Good Reader either over Wi-Fi or by USB file transfer, which is so easy to do since you just hook up your iPad to your desktop/laptop computer and do the file transfer in iTunes! Good Reader’s website provides incredibly detailed instructions on how to manage file transfers!

5)      Dragon Dictation:

• This FREE App has an App store rating of 3 out of 5 stars and we would definitely recommend it! This voice recognition application allows you to easily speak and instantly see your text or e-mail messages, and it is up to 5 times faster than typing on the keyboard! Any of the voice-to-text transcriptions that you create can be sent as SMS (text), Email, or pasted into any application! It’s great for when you’re on-the-go with your iPad and don’t have the time to type!