Specialty Insurance Blog

The Economy Impacts Broker Relationships

The economic crisis is changing how medium sized commercial insureds view the purchase of insurance, and this change is having an impact on their broker relationships. Not surprisingly, value, a euphemism for price, is becoming more important and broker relationships less important, or so says a recent study. Greenwich Associates has released the 2008 Middle Market Insurance Research Study. The press release for this survey is hard to find on their web site - try here or here - but summaries are available from Insurance Journal (here) and National Underwriter (here). Key points: The results … reveal that as the economic downturn set in over the past 12 months, companies began de-emphasizing broker customer service in favor of a much... Read more →

Value Added Services for Insurance Agents

What product and services do insurance agents and brokers, whether retail or wholesale, provide to their clients? Many practitioners define this narrowly – the product is insurance, the service is advice, and sell accordingly. However, some organizations have taken a wider perspective, and try to add additional value. The classic example in the specialty lines business, for an insurer, has been Hartford Steam Boiler Insurance Company, a company which provides both insurance and the expertise to significantly reduce catastrophic losses. A recent article in Business Insurance provides a retail agents perspective on providing added value through the provision of risk management services (see here). Anderson Baker, of Gillis, Ellis & Baker Inc., advocates providing loss prevention and risk management services... Read more →

Customer Surveys

Customer surveys are very popular in the insurance business, particularly online surveys. Our friend, Guy Kawasaki (see blog home here), has a very helpful post on The Art of Customer Surveys. Guy is the author of one of our favorite posts, The Art of Schmoozing. One of his key points is especially important in the insurance business – customers do not want to complete surveys. We selectively survey our customers using a few guidelines: Provide an opportunity to respond in an unobtrusive way Keep it short Get to the key point – will you use us again? While it is not foolproof, we have had success with this approach. Brought to you by Tennant Risk Services. Read more →

Specialization vs Diversification in Insurance

Both specialization and diversification can be successful strategies in the insurance business. In fact, diversification is one of the fundamentals of our business because it helps spread risk, which allows for the shifting of risk for reasonable pricing. Diversification can be accomplished through a variety of approaches, including line of business, product line, geographic concentration and distribution diversification strategies. Certainly no one would argue that diversification is not imperative in writing catastrophe exposed property insurance. However, specialization is also a strategy that provides some unique benefits, primarily the accumulation of a high degree of expertise in a particular specialty area (see our prior posts here & here). This expertise can be utilized in underwriting, risk management and claims to produce... Read more →