Quoting commercial lines can be a tedious and time-consuming process, filled with visits to many different carrier portals and redundant data entry. At Acrisure Great Lakes, we knew we needed to find a way to simplify the quoting process and give our staff time back to focus on higher-value tasks.
About two years ago, we decided it was time to adopt a commercial lines quoting solution. We piloted multiple solutions before finding the right fit for our agency and ultimately landed on Tarmika. Throughout that process, we came across many benefits to implementing a quoting tool. Some were expected, and others were not.
We think other agencies looking to adopt a comparative rater would benefit from our experience, so let's start with some of the more expected benefits of adopting a commercial lines quoting solution to simplify the quoting process.
Enabling efficiency
As our agency experienced growth, we needed to be efficient to remain competitive and successful. Commercial lines quoting solutions allow you to quote multiple markets at one time without needing to visit individual carrier websites and reenter data into each portal. Our team is able to collect data, find in-appetite markets and submit to markets all in one system. This saves us so much time and allows us to move on to the next task quickly.
Streamlining the remarketing process is especially important in today's hard insurance market where quick and informed decisions are essential. With rates changing quickly, and clients shopping around for better prices, agencies must move quickly. Our quoting solution allows us to do the due diligence needed to get the best coverage and prices available, without the time-consuming process of going into individual carrier portals to get quotes.
Finding the best options
While we want to move through the quoting process quickly, we still want to give our customers the best coverage options. When quoting manually, we could often only provide one or two options because we simply couldn't quote more than that and still get back to our clients in a timely fashion. While the options we provided may have been good, they may not have been the only – or the best - options available. On the other hand, if we spend time going into numerous carrier portals, we may not find a better option and have now delayed getting our client quotes and wasted time that could have been spent servicing other accounts.
With our commercial lines quoting solution, we can collect quotes from many different carriers and, based on their risks, pick the best options to send to the client. We may even find quotes from a market we didn't know was available.
Keeping tabs on the market
Now let's look at a few of the unexpected benefits we found after implementing a commercial lines quoting tool that have helped us better help our clients. One of those was the ability to keep better tabs on the market.
We are a generalist agency by nature, working with a mix of small businesses such as retail stores, restaurants, and contractors. Dealing with so many different industries can make it hard for our team to keep up with which carriers offer which types of coverage. Having an automated market appetite integrated into our quoting solution helps our agency stay on top of changing coverage options. We can easily see if a go-to carrier no longer covers that risk, or if a carrier has expanded their coverage in a particular market. It's another way we are able to offer the best option to our clients in a timely manner.
Training new employees
As I mentioned above, Acrisure Great Lakes has had to scale our growth over the past few years. Part of that was adding a new marketing specialist to our team in December of 2023. Anyone who has onboarded a new employee knows it takes a lot of time to get them up to speed. We found that our commercial lines quoting tool was a great place to start training. It wasn't something we expected when we adopted the solution, however, we were able to help our new marketing specialist learn about appetite, what some companies like to quote and what they don't like to quote and get a sense of what certain kinds of coverage look like. It was a great tool for us to use in the training process.
I know new technology can be intimidating, but it's important to embrace technology rather than be afraid of it because you could find that it saves your agency time and effort. You may even find your own unexpected use cases like we did.
