Creative workarounds for regional commercial insurers

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From scratch-off lotto tickets in snail-mail birthday cards to welcome videos in online information hubs, the past two years have prompted regional commercial insurance agencies to get creative with technology and communication.

The goal: to provide enhanced security and customer service experiences for their clients during a global pandemic.

“Quick and nimble,” is how Kevin Tehan, employee benefits consultant, for Lawley Insurance, described his firm’s response to the pandemic. “We immediately established a task force that began meeting and asking, ‘What do our clients need right now?’”

With many commercial clients’ brick-and-mortar locations closed and employees working from home, Tehan’s team promptly identified the need to move open-enrollment informational sessions online.

Open enrollment is a brief period, typically once annually, when employees of companies learn about and make changes to their elected employee benefits options, like health and dental insurance. Before the pandemic, most open-enrollment information sessions were held in person.

Lawley began creating online hubs for each company with a video of their CEO or human resources representative welcoming them to open enrollment. The hub contained all the resources employees would need, including PowerPoint presentations, videos, and a way to connect for more information.

The hubs were so well-received that Lawley, an independent regional firm and third-generation family business, plans to continue them as an option for its commercial clients going forward.

Instead of doing several in-person sessions for different groups of employees, the hubs free up time for clients and provide streamlined information.

“Everyone’s getting the same message and good accurate information at the same time,” Tehan said. “Work is not the traditional nine-to-five anymore and employees need to be able to access information [like open enrollment] anytime, from home.”

Wyatt Matulic-Keller, a producer with Brighton-Pittsford Agency, Inc., and his colleagues also found ways to use technology to improve customer service for their clients over the past two years. Brighton-Pittsford is a full-service, family-owned independent agency founded in 1953.

“Once the pandemic hit we started utilizing a lot of different programs to stay in touch with clients,” Matulic-Keller said. “Zoom started the become an integral part of client meetings and the pandemic brought about a lot more digital delivery of policies. These changes are ones we continue to use now.”

Matulic-Keller, like Tehan, noted that not every client necessarily wanted to communicate more digitally, and, for those clients, more traditional approaches and creative workarounds were respected.

Both agencies did see a big uptick not only in commercial clients that embraced insurance technology but had an interest in cyber liability insurance (also known as cyber or cyber risk insurance).

This type of insurance contract can be purchased by a business to help reduce the financial risks of doing business online, like data breaches.

National demand for cybersecurity insurance has increased exponentially in the past few years. AdvisorSmith, an information resource for small business owners, reports that according to data from a leading insurance broker, the percentage of their clients with cyber insurance increased from roughly 25% in 2016 to just under 50% in 2020.

Cyber insurance comes with a cost though, due to an increasing number of businesses experiencing cyber losses driving up claims. The average cost of cyber insurance for small businesses rose approximately 7% for 2021 policies, AdvisorSmith reports, with the estimated average annual premium at $1,589 for $1 million in cyber liability coverage.

“Cybersecurity is on the mind of a lot more clients and those who find the cost worthwhile do it,” Matulic-Keller said. “We are writing cyber-liability policies more and more because there are more and more instances of cyber-attacks and data breaches.”

The focus on cybersecurity goes both ways too, with insurance companies making sure they safeguard their clients by protecting their technology and private information via encrypted emails, two-factor authorization, and other means.

“Anything we can do to protect data we do,” Tehan said. “Any technology we use we vet with our director of IT. Any tech we roll out has already been vetted and we have a team of people here who specialize in cyber security.”

Gordon Quinton, president of Quinton Insurance, is also seeing an uptick in interest in and policies written for cyber insurance, so much so that the agency has had third-party speaks present to their clients on the importance of cybersecurity.

The speakers are part of a series of monthly webinars the agency started during the pandemic to help stay connected with their clients and educate them on important, timely topics like cybersecurity and the federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan-application process.

During the pandemic the agency, which Quinton founded in Rochester in 1996, also saw increased interest in their online portal, where clients can safely access policies, cards, and other documents.

“We had the portal before the pandemic, but clients didn’t embrace it,” Quinton said. “Since the pandemic clients have embraced the technology.”

Still, it was important to Quinton that during the pandemic his agency connected to their clients in non-tech ways too.

They did some creative snail-mail outreach to their clients, including a printed, hard copy newsletter with fun contests inside, a holiday calendar, and birthday cards with scratch-off lottery tickets inside.

“It was a terrible situation what we were all going through and anything we could do to take our clients’ stress levels down and give them a smile we did,” Quinton said.

Caurie Putnam is a Rochester-area freelance writer.