Streamlining Submissions Means Less Busywork

An agent can spend 20 minutes to over an hour filling out an insurance application, depending on the line of business and risk complexity – and that’s just for a renewal. What each insurer requires in terms of forms, data, and process also varies. Agents typically work with an average of five carriers. Multiply all of that paperwork and processing per submission per insurer, and it becomes clear how much time an agent must dedicate to busywork.

Within the insurer’s organization, the submission lifecycle can lengthen even more through siloed, high-touch processes without a coordinated approach to customer acquisition. Meanwhile, the new prospect or renewing policyholder is waiting for indicative pricing to decide which insurer and agent can best serve them.

Submissions are critical to ease of doing business, market share, and agent and customer satisfaction. Agents and insurers alike lose out with inefficient submission processes and risk losing or disappointing customers who have to wait.

Fortunately, this is a solvable problem. Efficiency gains in the submission process benefit everyone involved. An insurer who can streamline the submission-to-quote journey attracts and retains more agents and customers. At the same time, agents spend less time checking boxes and rekeying data in favor of serving their customers. Time spent in front of a computer screen is time they can’t spend more productively, dealing with the people they represent.

By leveraging and pre-filling 3rd-party data from external sources, insurers empower agents to create quotes fast. Information is more accurate, more current, and less likely to contain entry errors. By fulfilling all submission guidelines at once, insurers can minimize back and forth with the agent, resulting in quicker quote response times.

They also reduce errors in their submissions and increase compliance by automating the quote review process. When the quality of submissions increases, quoting processes become faster with a higher overall rate of closure.

This blog post is the second in a series on streamlining your quoting processes with an emphasis on getting the most bang for your buck. Our next topic is the top pain points in the Qualification stage of the quoting process.

We’re sharing our expertise on the quoting lifecycle to give you new ideas to enhance the ease of doing business. We’ll look at lessons learned from our clients, specific case studies, thought leadership, and technology trends that affect your submission and quoting processes.

To learn more in the meantime, you can look through our case study library for quoting success stories, like the 85% reduction in quoting time achieved by our client Appalachian Underwriters. We also helped a regional carrier shift more than 60% of their BOP business to straight-through processing.

At OwlSurance, we have years of experience working with our insurer and MGA clients to simplify their submissions and streamline their business processes. We help our customers prioritize ease of doing business and provide the technology and insurance know-how to help them get there.

1 Renewal timeframe statistics from Insurance Business America.

About OwlSurance

At OwlSurance, a cloud business unit of ValueMomentum, Inc., we offer a unified data platform because we believe in the power of unified data to transform how people do business. Let us help accelerate your data journey with the right technology and the expertise you need to put it to work for you. For more information, visit us at www.owlsurance.com.