Wording Lookup

Pop quiz: What workflow evoked gasps from a room full of commercial lines brokers in Toronto last spring, at a session of the Organization of Real-time Brokers Implementing Technology (ORBiT)?

Was it: A) real-time rating of a small business risk submitted from a mobile app; or B) real-time wording lookup? If you answered B) real-time wording lookup, you would be correct. Sometimes, it seems, it is the low-hanging fruit that tastes the sweetest.

If you have followed the development of commercial lines data exchange over the last decade, what you have seen is a focus, by both insurers and vendors, on building solutions for new business activities. Primarily, two phases of the marketing lifecycle: uploading of new business submissions, and downloading of the resulting quotation. This is logical, as both brokers and insurers focus on new business activity as a means to grow, and automating this process facilitates quicker growth.

However, studies have shown that only 10 to15% of a broker’s activity is spent on generating new business. The remainder of time is spent on transactions servicing customers, like generating renewals, endorsements, claims and policy inquiry, and wording lookup. These are called in-force policy transactions.

As part of a strategic initiative to help brokers in the independent distribution channel compete against the growing strength of the direct writer, Policy Works Inc. and SGI CANADA scrutinized their existing real-time policy workflows and found a gap. In October of 2013, the two companies released the industry’s first-ever real-time wording lookup in commercial lines.

To see the benefits of real-time wording lookup, we need to compare it to the current wording lookup process, which looks something like this:

• a broker receives a phone call from a client, inquiring about coverages on his or her commercial policy;

• the broker opens the insured and

policy file in its commercial management system (CMS), or wherever it is stored;

• the insured, in the meantime, is put on hold as the broker must leave the CMS and log in to the insurer portal. This requires the broker to remember the specific login credentials for the insurer site. NB: brokers have multiple user names and passwords for their various insurer portals;

• once logged in, the broker must then search for and find the correct version of the wording to match the current in-force policy; and

• depending on how many “clicks” are required to locate a wording, the broker may be tempted to save a PDF copy to its system for ease of reference in the future.

Is this a show-stopping workflow? No. But it is a big frustration. Forcing brokers to leave their desktop CMS environments creates unnecessary friction in a time-sensitive situation, and that need not be present.

In the new, real-time workflow, wording lookup is a simplified process where a broker:

• receives a phone call from a client,

inquiring about coverages on his or her commercial policy;

• opens the insured and policy file in the CMS; and

• clicks on a link next to the coverage in question and views the wording within seconds – all without leaving the CMS.

What is the technology behind this feature? Taking the policy number, effective dates and wording number identifier, Policy Works calls a web service hosted by SGI CANADA and passes these parameters to the service. The service determines the correct version of the wording that is in force for the policy, and returns a PDF version of the specific wording to Policy Works.

Policy Works then displays the PDF using the client’s viewer, such as Acrobat. The broker is not required to attach the wording to Policy Works because it can be looked up at any time in the future. More importantly, the broker does not need to sign in because his or her credentials are passed – along with the other parameters – to SGI CANADA’s web service and the user is instantly authenticated.

How does this benefit brokers? Staying in the system. There are no user name and password combinations to remember or external portals to navigate and learn. As a one-off, this may not seem like that big a deal. But multiply that by thousands of in-force policies, and then by a broker’s carriers, and it can become frustrating.

“Stopping what you are doing to log in the insurer portal in search of a policy wording is a distraction that takes only a few moments, but it breaks the flow of thought and action previously engaged in,” states Elizabeth Ann Gallant, commercial lines manager at Cooke Insurance Group. “Considering the number of user names and passwords each broker has, the ability to retrieve a wording without changing systems and completing another login is a simple time saver that enhances the efficiency to the process of retrieving a policy wording. In addition, it avoids the potential of basing a discussion on an attached outdated or incorrect policy wording.”

Using single sign-on functionality within Policy Works, brokers store data exchange (insurer portal) credentials like user name and password for their insurer partners. This eliminates the need for brokers to remember, and then re-enter, credentials every time this type of activity is required.

Time-saving: As indicated in an article by Grant Patten of CSIO in the April 2013 edition of The Ontario Broker magazine, the estimated time saved by similar activities, like policy inquiry, is approximately 60 to 90 seconds. Multiply 90 seconds by a thousand inquiries, and now you have saved 25 hours of non-productive work.

Correct wordings: Previously, there was an implicit responsibility placed on the broker to ensure the wording the brokers were viewing was correct. It was up to them to search for and locate the correct wording. And if the document was saved to the CMS, the broker then had to worry about whether or not it was outdated.

Not any more. With real-time wording lookup, the two systems ensure that the wording is correct, and the broker only needs to worry about one thing: properly communicating with and servicing the client. This removes, from the workflow, a risk that occurs every day: the potential for an errors and omission lawsuit. Real-time wording lookup is the result of a shared vision between Policy Works and SGI CANADA, one that focuses on increasing the efficiency of the independent broker distribution channel. And really, this begins at the front-line level with tools that enable brokers to compete.

Tighter system-to-system integrations are required if the independent broker distribution channel is to be as competitive as – or more competitive than – the direct writer model. This means brokers need to seamlessly connect systems so that front-line workflows are enabled by technology, not hamstrung by it.