Agent Experience for Commercial Lines Online Quoting: A Snap Poll for the Celent Executive Panel

Snap polls reflect questions posed by members of the Celent Executive Panel, a group of C level executives in the insurance industry. This question came about from a member who was looking for insights and advice around the agent experience when quoting commercial insurance online. This deck provides a summary of the responses to a Snap Poll conducted December 2022 . 16 insurers responded to this survey.

If you are an insurer and are interested in participating and receiving these snap polls, please email kcarnahan@celent.com to verify eligibility.

The question that was posed was:

Background:

This insurer is looking at the agent experience for quoting commercial lines business. They’re looking at how much help technology is providing when an agent submits something for small commercial or small WC – but really, it’s middle market – or large commercial. Their current process is that if something is submitted for small commercial /WC and it doesn’t qualify, their system will decline it rather than letting them know that the account may still qualify for a middle market quote. They’re curious if others have solved this problem and if so, how they’ve solved it.

Questions:

Note – where we use the term commercial, we intend that to include WC as well.

• Does your portal support quoting for small commercial lines/WC? What about middle market? What about large commercial?
• Is it a single system or do you have multiple systems that the agents submit through (e.g. small business goes here and middle market goes there)
• From the system perspective, is there a clear delineation between small commercial and middle market commercial?
• What is the upper threshold for small commercial/WC?
• Is the appetite guide integrated across all commercial products?
• Is the appetite guide defined as a set of business rules (e.g. this class code, this protection/hazard class, no losses = in appetite) or is it more nuanced? Are you using AI to help determine the appetite (e.g. google scrape shows photos of cranes on their website, therefore decline)?
• When it comes to the non comp lines, can the system intelligently determine whether a BOP is warranted or whether it should be a package policy – or – does the agent select the product type? Is it precise enough to know that, for example, a manufacturer doesn’t qualify for a BOP, but is eligible for a package policy?
• If the system can determine, are you doing this using some kind of AI? Or is it done by stacking business rules? (e.g. if this class code and this level of revenue, and this number of units, then = eligible for BOP)
• If an agent requests a small commercial quote, but the account doesn’t qualify for small commercial – does it just get declined? Or does the system notify the agent that it may still qualify for a middle market quote? Or does the system automatically provide a middle market quote?
• If the submission can’t be quoted online, does the system notify them that it’s being rerouted to an underwriter? Does it tell them the contact information for that underwriter?
• If you’re unable to do any of this today –
• Is this a known pain point that you hear from agents?
• Is it on your roadmap to fix? Is it on a 6 month, 1 year or 5 year roadmap?
• Do you have any sense of how much business you’re losing today by not having a stronger handoff between small commercial and middle market?