Most E&S transactions are still largely carried out over the phone and email. The steps are rarely standardized and structured for this process-intensive workflow. This makes it difficult to automate, at times. At Pathpoint, we made the workflow quicker and easier by making it possible for agents to self-serve the bind process.
Agents kept telling us that they didn't know what steps to take after Pathpoint presented them with quotes. There was a lot of back and forth communication between agents and our underwriters that slowed down the bind process. It was important for the agents to move fast because a lot of their clients needed insurance coverage yesterday. The Agent Growth and Engagement (AGE) team saw this problem as an opportunity to improve our service.
Next, we asked ourselves, “Is this a worthwhile problem to solve?” We hypothesized that making it possible for an agent to self-serve the bind process would allow them to deliver quotes to their clients faster. We can also make it easier for an agent by allowing them to complete the bind process in one place and without the emails and phone calls. We know that if we can help an agent win their client’s business, Pathpoint wins, because our goals align.
The AGE team then conducts research to understand if this is a worthwhile problem to solve. We had conversations with the insurance experts on our team to understand what each of our carriers needed from agents to bind and issue a policy. We audited across carriers for overlapping subjectivities to identify what to standardize. We also looked at which parts of the bind process we can automate with our carrier API integrations. We closed the knowledge gap and built conviction on what solution was viable, desirable and feasible.
After defining the specifications, our Product, Design, and Engineering teams continue to narrow down on ideas for the agent experience that would work with our constraints. Each idea is reviewed for its pros and cons to eliminate ones we’re not confident about and converge on the ones we are confident about. Our team then takes the ideas to agents for feedback to evaluate whether we're solving the right parts of the bind process.
As a team, AGE focuses on the agent experience. We go through a few cycles of exploring ideas, reviewing with stakeholders, refining the ideas, and testing them with agents before our team is confident in releasing the updates into the application. The learning doesn’t stop after release. We continue to monitor how agents are using the feature and identify improvements.
It’s never fun to hear about a problem that an agent is experiencing, especially within our application, and solving them is not always easy. The challenge is worth it and rewarding when we see agents get value out of what we create. Our goal is always to help agents get multiple quotes, faster.
