Why listening to customers, using tech solves insurance challenges

As a product development professional in the insurance technology space, I spend a lot of time thinking about our customers' challenges and about how we can meet their needs through smart and intuitive design. 

Take, for example, the experience of quoting and binding E&S insurance. Independent insurance agents tell us that this is an unduly complicated proposition today; our research shows that agents anticipate their biggest challenges this year will be finding markets and putting in the effort it takes to get quotes. When we surveyed our independent agent partners recently about what they hoped for in 2022, these agents overwhelmingly told us that they are hoping for more opportunities to grow and make their business easier to attain. This includes additional capacity via market access and softening, as well as the ability to get business quoted. 

The solution to the first item on this list, reducing the friction to get quotes, lies less in technology than in access. This can be addressed by partnering with the right markets. Finding the right partner markets who can provide agents with a digital experience such as getting quotes automatically after submitting is imperative to streamlining the wholesale quoting and binding process. 

To address the second challenge cited by agents, that of obtaining E&S quotes, we need to start by evaluating what the quoting process looks like today. In the E&S space, there's significantly more nuance for a carrier to want to underwrite a risk than there is in the admitted market. This stands to reason; if a risk gets declined by the admitted market, carriers will want to understand and capture more details to ensure they are willing to process the risk. But it's easy to see why it leaves a bad taste in agents' mouths when they think about the E&S market if they've become accustomed to extensive applications and endless back-and-forth. For smaller premium policies especially, the length and extensiveness of the application as well as the back and forth communication for clarification can be too onerous and costly to support.

This is a place where technology can make a real difference. If the proper criteria are captured in the submission flow as part of an application, even if a risk gets referred, the underwriter has the information they need already to make a determination. This means increased speed and simplicity; not just within seconds for risks that can be auto-quoted, but within hours without back and forth for risks that go to referral.

The key to utilizing technology to improve this process is ensuring that carrier needs, requirements, and trust can be upheld. Carriers often express concern about adherence and flexibility to adjust their underwriting and appetite guidelines. 

Getting carriers comfortable that they will receive the information they need includes walking them through how to embed FAQs and using dynamic logic to surface questions dependent on prior responses, eliminating the need to ask as many explicit questions within the process. In addition to optimizing question flows to gather data, resource guidance for additional transparency on criteria of what is included or excluded, with eligibility detail and ISO classifications visible within application. Carriers recognize that this is not an automated check, but a process that allows agents to take a real-time look at class code, see what is included and excluded, and make the proper determination. This goes a long way toward instilling confidence in the process on the carrier side.

In addition, there are a variety of really interesting things that companies are doing to help reduce reliance on agents to provide data. For example, with de-risk self-attestation, an agent inputs the address of a property, from which we can capture details like when the roof was replaced by utilizing forms that scour publicly accessible data or satellite imagery. We are calculating distance to coast this way today, but there is definitely an opportunity to go further with this, automating and leveraging third-party tools or platforms. The increased ability to capture necessary information is equally appealing to carriers that need these details and to the independent agents who don't want to waste time providing them.

As insurtechs look to solve industry challenges through technology, understanding stakeholder needs is an important starting point. There are countless ways to maximize and leverage the power of technology and the accessibility of public information to improve processes and products. Listening to customers is always the best place to start.