What we learned about insurance this year.

This last couple of months our agency focus has been on security and how that is handled by the multiple carriers we have. It got me looking deeper into the carriers we have and though I had already made decisions to move away from some carriers, it solidified my decision in doing so. When your focus is always on service & sales and a hard insurance market like this hits you start looking at carriers under a microscope. What I found is that some of my carriers, mostly those who have a national footprint have the market mastered. There was deep need to take rate increases by all carrier for the last 4 years consecutively. What I noticed is that some carriers adjusted rate immediately and at a lower rate hike overall but were building their way up to the rate the market actually calls for. It was a quick assessment of the live market, making appropriate rate hikes immediately to course correct the rating as quickly as possible. Turns out that matters, because now those carriers are slowing on high-rate adjustments or leveling out their rates. How your insurance carrier handles the business is important. We had a security breach in June with one of our carriers and it highlighted for us more about how carriers are doing business overall and making decisions that could truly affect our client's, thankfully in that incident no client data was breached but it shut down production and service completely for over a month and caused great distress to our clients and our team and agency hours lost to assisting in the recovery process was more than we'd ever experienced as a team and from a workload perspective nearly it broke our office after 16 years in business. Worst working experience we've ever had and left the worst impression. Though that incident got us looking deeper we found that we need to be paying absolute attention to how they handle things like, service when our clients call in, how they handle security and protection of personal data, how are they responding to the need to take significant rate to keep the market level, and how do they treat the agency as well. What carriers deserve our client's business because they can check all the boxes. And in today's market all insurance carriers are slightly different in all of those categories, but what I have grown to know, is that when it is a soft market smaller carriers are great, but when the challenges pile up, the national carriers just do it all slightly better and that's a real thing. Since technology has made life more challenging in some ways, like with security & data issues, paying attention to how your insurance company conducts business matters. And your agent knows who is and who isn't looking out for the best interests of clients. There are some companies whose focus is there and there are some that aren't. I started in this industry as a claims adjuster for Hartford a national carrier. I have been with a national and a regional, and I think after all these years I just see how the big boys do business, sustains, protects the client, and keeps rates more stable overall. The fluctuation in pricing is softer and services overall are better from security to client app services and 24-hour licensed agent services when the office is closed for the evenings and weekends, it's just a whole different ball game. It's 24 hours 7 days a week business of doing insurance, and regionals can't offer that kind of client support, not in a sophisticated way. It's the biggest lesson we've learned this year.