Written By: Tanner Luxner, Product Marketing Manager
Ease of doing business (EODB) has been a popular term for insurers in recent years, always referring to doing business with your agent partners. Achieving it has been a big KPI for any insurer with an independent channel as competition becomes an increasingly large factor within the industry. Seventy-seven percent of agents in a recent survey rated their underwriting experience as very important when considering the performance of the carriers they work with [1]. This leads us to an important question: have you reached EODB?
If you’re like most carriers today, you’re looking to truly streamline your underwriting process – especially when you’re looking to address complex risk. This has been a common problem for today’s insurer, with insurance proprietary information coming from many disparate sources, turning your underwriting team’s attempts to quickly address risks into a treasure hunt for the information they need. This can have a significant impact on the department’s bottom line, as underwriters can spend hours of their week just searching for the information they need, taking them away from their essential tasks.
How is the modern carrier addressing this issue? We’ve seen two big ways that insurers overcome these obstacles:
1. Provide the information your underwriters need from day 1:
To successfully streamline the underwriting process, your team should have easy access to publications from top insurance publishers. This not only speeds up the work that your current team is able to do when underwriting high-profit, complex lines of business, but also allows new or inexperienced employees to quickly adapt.
2. Consolidate vital information into a single place:
Access to frequently accessed information from publishers and your proprietary information should be a simple, painless, and easily repeatable process for your underwriters. Instead of wasting time going to a myriad of publisher websites, and searching around in internal databases, modern carriers consolidate both these internal and external sources of information into a single searchable location.
The underwriting process doesn’t need to be a tedious process. By emulating the actions of successful carriers and streamlining the underwriting process, you’ll be able to significantly increase your underwriting capacity. This can result in a big change to your bottom line while simultaneously becoming easier for your agents to do business with.