Commercial Lines? There’s an App for That

Thousands of apps for smart phones and iPads give tech-savvy customers a wide range of functions, from booking a flight to making a dinner reservation and conducting bank transactions. Does this mobile access have a future in commercial lines insurance?

We’ve answered this question by creating the Policy Works Producer app.

Policy Works has bundled many of its best ideas in an iPad application that we think could change the way commercial insurance is sold. Producers and prospects will be able to meet and share information like never before. The discussion around risk, coverage and pricing will be more detailed, engaging and professional. Once the information is reviewed with the prospect, the producer will be able to submit the risk to markets right from the prospect’s office. No more bundling up documents and spreadsheets to cart back to the brokerage.

As insurance companies continue to evolve their broker connectivity solutions to produce real-time rates, the Producer app will show policy premiums to the prospect in real time as they come in. The promise of speed, transparency and accessible information has never been closer for commercial producers and their increasingly sophisticated, demanding clients. Field-testing with select brokers will begin in March.

The Producer App

The Producer app is intended to augment one of the primary roles of the commercial insurance broker — that of the front-line underwriter. “As brokers, we are the front-line underwriters,” says Paula Dorsey, president of The Dorsey Group. “We need to embrace anything that can help us in that role and make us more efficient. We need to be able to gather the right kind of information and ensure it gets to the underwriter in a complete and accurate submission.”

Professional brokers like Paula are committed to gathering complete, thorough information about a prospect. A great deal of that information is now available through online sources. Our Producer app gives producers a tool to help collect that information up front, verify it with prospective customers and package it into a professional submission for insurers.

When it comes to meeting client expectations, quick adopters of technology can be powerful drivers of change. Consider, for example, two brokers meeting with a prospective client. One comes armed with information about the prospect’s business from online sources and demonstrates a solid understanding of the client’s business through a fun and engaging conversation around an iPad. The other broker arrives with the proverbial cocktail napkin on which to jot down some notes. To whom will the modern client gravitate, even if the premium is a little higher?

Building a great mobile app for commercial lines is challenging and requires a new way of thinking. Although tablets are fantastic for gathering, organizing and sharing information, they are not very good for detailed data entry. So how do you build a tool producers can use effectively in the field? We have been working on this problem for over two years now and have designed a really simple interface that is actually fun to use. No, really! We call it SASI, which stands for Simplified Application for Specific Industries.

We studied the commercial lines information our brokers are exchanging electronically with nine insurers today and identified a common set of data. We then created a user interface based on this data set. We made it look a lot like the paper forms our producers use today because we felt familiarity would ensure ease of use and hence adoption in the field. Finally, we turned the problem of data entry on its head: we incorporated third-party data and coverage templates to transform the task of data entry into one of data validation. So instead of keying in a bunch of data, a broker can simply confirm or reject each piece of information with their prospect and key in only what needs to be corrected.

The diversity of commercial risks adds another dimension to the challenge of building a mobile app. “When you look at opportunities for brokers, I think there will be a divide between the transaction-based small business clients and the larger, higher-end clients,” notes Jim McGregor, president of The Precept Group. “The sweet spot will likely be in the middle. There are opportunities with mid-market clients to use technology to make things more efficient and combine that with the professionalism of the broker’s advice.”

Our mobile app is designed to handle a wide spectrum of risks. We made it easy to handle simple package-policy risks without compromising the flexibility required to handle the multiple locations and complex coverages typical of larger risks.

Technology and Trust

Technology aside, mid-market risks present a whole other set of challenges to brokers. Here the value of the broker’s human connection and trust are paramount, both with underwriters and clients. Brokers working in this domain are hesitant to use the automated rating workflows of portals because they can often get a better quote from underwriters who trust the broker’s “gut” feeling about a risk. Commercial clients, too, demand a higher level of service and face-to-face contact with brokers than personal lines customers.

This human connection can be enhanced by sharing information that goes beyond what today’s commercial portals can do. Things like broker notes, photographs, satellite views, and loss and inspection reports demonstrate to the underwriter and the client that brokers have done their homework; they go a long ways towards establishing the trust required for these risks. So how do we collect and exchange information that goes beyond CSIO standards while still realizing the efficiencies the standards bring?

On the broker side, our SASI interface is built right into the Producer app. That makes it easier to capture standard CSIO information for simple, one-location risks as well as larger, multi-location risks.

The Producer app also makes it easy to include information that goes beyond the scope of CSIO standards. Producers can gather information like loss and inspection reports, front-facing photos and top-down property shots from online sources prior to visiting a prospect. Once onsite, they can add notes to capture their “gut feel” about a risk. They can take photographs with the iPad itself to give underwriters a good sense of the risk. Producers can even incorporate additional information provided by the client, such as equipment schedules, with just the touch of a finger.

On the insurer side, we’ve been working with carriers to lay the groundwork for building systems that will maximize the amount of time underwriters spend working with their brokers on mid-market and larger risks. These systems will perform “electronic triage” to map, score and route incoming submissions either to an automated rating system for transaction-based small business risks that qualify, or to an underwriter when human judgment is required.

Underwriters will see all of the rich information collected in the field by the producer using the Producer app and will be spared from the tedium of re-keying CSIO standard data — and associated re-work due to errors — into their underwriting toolset. Ultimately this will enable them to spend more time working with their brokers doing what they do best: underwriting.