Exploring the benefits of a commercial lines quoting solution

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 had to find a way to streamline the quote process and give 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 tested several solutions before finding the right solution for our agency and finally landed on Tarmika. Throughout this process, we have found many benefits in implementing a rating tool. Some were expected and some were not.

We believe that other agencies looking to adopt a peer reviewer would benefit from our experience, so let’s start with some of the more anticipated 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 in order to remain competitive and successful. Commercial line quoting solutions allow you to quote multiple markets at the same time without having to visit individual operator websites and re-enter data into each portal. Our team is able to collect data, find markets in appetite and send markets in one system. This saves us so much time and allows us to quickly move on to the next task.

Streamlining the remarketing process is especially important in today’s tough insurance market, where quick and informed decisions are essential. With rapidly changing rates and customers shopping for better prices, agencies need to move quickly. Our quoting solution allows us to do the due diligence to get the best coverage and pricing available, without the time-consuming process of accessing individual carrier portals to get quotes.

Finding the best options

While we want to move through the quoting process quickly, we still want to offer our customers the best coverage options. When we were quoting manually, we would often only be able to offer one or two options because we simply couldn’t quote more than that and still get back to our customers in a timely manner. While the options we provided may have been good, they may not have been the only – or best – options available. On the other hand, if we spend time going through numerous shipping portals, we may not find a better option and now we are delayed in getting our customers’ offers and wasting time that could have been spent on other accounts.

With our commercial lines quote solution, we can collect quotes from many different carriers and, based on their risks, choose the best options to send to the customer. We might even find quotes from a market we didn’t know was available.

Market tracking

Now let’s look at some of the unexpected benefits we found after implementing a trade lines quoting tool that helped us better serve our customers. One of these was the ability to keep a better record of 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 difficult for our team to keep up with which carriers offer which types of coverage. With automatic market appetite built into our quote solution, our agency stays on top of changing coverage options. We can easily see if a carrier no longer covers this risk or if a carrier has expanded its coverage in a certain market. It’s another way we can offer our customers the best option in a timely manner.

Training of new employees

As mentioned above, Acrisure Great Lakes has had to scale our growth over the past few years. Part of this was the addition of a new marketing specialist to our team in December 2023. Anyone who has brought a new employee on board knows that it takes a long time to get them up to speed. We found our Trade Line Quotation Tool to be 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 marketer learn about appetite, what some companies like to quote and what they don’t like to quote and to understand what specific types of coverage look like. It was a great tool that we use in the training process.

I know new technology can be intimidating, but it’s important to embrace technology rather than fear it, as you may find it saves your agency time and effort. You might even find your own unexpected use cases, like we did.