Quoting your insurance. Is it really the best practice for your business?

Quoting, quoting, quoting. Most business owners and most insurance agents have mutually been trained in one thing when it comes to insurance cost savings. That is? QUOTING. 

Business owners have been taught and trained that they have to get quotes year after year in order to keep their agent “honest” or because they believe or have been taught that it’s “the best practice.”

Insurance agents are rampant, we (I can say this because I’m one of them) are like gnats. We are everywhere and always bugging you. You can’t get rid of us. You, the business owner, get 25-50 calls from us every week and those calls and emails only ramp up as you get close to your renewal date.

The issue with this is 2 fold.

1. Because of the competition and lack of training, agents have been conditioned that our only tool is quoting. So caution is thrown to the wind and the pressure is on to do whatever can be done to get the best price, a lot of times even to the detriment of what’s best for the customer (see my article The True Cost of Being a Price First Insurance Shopper)
2. Because of market conditioning, media (adds, commercials, ect.) and constant bombarding of calls coming in from agents promising they can save money, business owners are wired to believe the only way they can control their insurance costs is by quoting. I mean heck, I can save 15% in 15 minutes?

I want to challenge this thinking. There is a whole world of savings outside of quoting. What? Yes, you heard me correctly. Quoting your insurance only gets you so far. I mean eventually the savings has to end, right?

Your total insurance cost is made up of many different factors. Of which, I won’t go into detail here.

Here are just a few of the factors that can have a huge impact on your total insurance cost:

  1. Experience Modification

1. Audits
2. Return to Work Programs
3. Hiring practices

Have you ever explored just these few factors and how they can affect your total insurance cost? A lot of these are over looked and never talked about. Resulting in a major dis-service and thousands of dollars lost. Instead of putting these thousands in the pockets of the business owners, the money is going into the pockets of the insurance company.

I want to say again, there is a WHOLE WORLD of savings outside of just quoting of which I am only touching briefly a small portion. Here are a few true situations I have had the privilege to be a part of to demonstrate what I am claiming.

Just by working on a customer’s hiring practices, we saved them over $72,000 over 4 years. That was on top of being priced very competitively in each one of those years.

That savings was completely separate from quoting. 

I’ll give you another true example, we saved another customer over $36,000 just by asking one simple question “Are all your employees still doing today exactly what they were doing the day you hired them?” Again, this was on top of being priced very competitively.

That savings of over $36,000 was accomplished completely separate from quoting.

Last example: I brought on a new customer a number of years back who had not seen their agent in 3 years. The agent just mailed them their policy every year.  I added over $2,000,000 worth of coverage (filled some major coverage gaps) and saved them around 25% on their insurance premium. On top of that, they had an error on their Experience Modification. This error had never been caught by the client’s previous agent, and the error had been in place for 10 years. Because I studied the client outside of just quoting, I caught the error and fixed it. I got their Experience MOD reduced from a 1.30 (which is a 30% surcharge) to a .91 (providing a 9% discount). I then went back to their previous insurance carrier and got them to honor the corrected MOD from previous years. This simple MOD correction produced over $16,000 of savings instantly. The prior insurance company actually wrote them a check.

That savings of over $16,000 was completely separate from quoting.

These are just a few very brief examples and situations where huge savings was accomplished outside of the quoting system.

Start having these conversations. In my 10 years of experience I have seen these situations over and over again. Let’s dig our feet in, build relationships and achieve huge savings outside of just quoting.