Consumer Confidence
Jerry Fox, vice president for agency operations for MSB said what agencies are looking for to help them simplify their day and make them more profitable are real- time transactions that happen now. “The consumer expects those transactions to happen that way because that’s the way their life is in every other part of the world. The consumer has an expectation to get an answer now and they want that answer to be correct.” The following are excerpts from that interview.
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JERRY FOX Vice President for Agency Operations, MSB
answer now and they want that answer to be correct, so the agency force is looking for the tool that can make that happen.
“ ” The consumer has an expectation to get an
The biggest challenges the independent agency market faces in writing homeowners business: Unlike the auto side of the business that you can pretty much get an issuable or bindable quote within a matter of minutes or seconds in a comparative environment, on the property side of the business they’re still reliant on time. In other words, they have to either wait for something to come back from the carrier instead of being able to get it immediately in a comparative environment, or it may change upon issuance because all of the reports and nec- essary information isn’t being passed to the comparative rater at this time.
What MSB is doing to address these issues: We’ve built an ease-of-doing-business initiative. It basically revolves around our network we’re putting together called Grand Central Express, or GCX. The GCX network allows the agents to input data once into their comparative rater, into a familiar and consistent workflow, and get the stan- dardized calculation, which is then passed to the carri- ers that are also involved in the GCX or Grand Central Express networks, thus making a once-and-done transac- tion, making it clean and getting the same number from all carriers.
The progress made with MSB’s initiatives to address these needs: We have signed up both the two top rating vendors in the country, and in one of the regional play- ers we’re working with, four and five of the other regional comparative rating markets, to get them plugged in to our GCX network. The carriers are waiting in line to get involved because they see the benefit to their agency force and to themselves. So building our Grand Central Express network has been very successful and we’ll be seeing results of that in the fourth quarter of this year. We’ll have the full connection done.
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Best’s Review October 2012
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