Executive summary

Rate Insurance replaced their third-party vendor for compliance and distribution channel management with AgentSync’s Manage product, but their continued use of e-signature tools complicated onboarding. With the addition of AgentSync Contracting to the team’s software stack, Rate Insurance has been able to scale up onboarding without sacrificing accuracy or having to onboard an army of administrators.

With Manage+Contracting, Rate Insurance has:

• Lowered NIGO applications to carriers by more than 90 percent
• Doubled the number of carriers the agency represents
• Reduced agents’ administrative onboarding time from two days to one hour
• Sped up the ready-to-sell process
• More than doubled agent headcount in 3 years

High NIGO rates, agent frustration

Rate Insurance is the insurance wing of a mortgage brokerage, streamlining mortgage customers’ insurance shopping experience by providing property, casualty, life, and commercial lines of business in 50 states.

As the core mortgage business has grown, the insurance business has had to be nimble and navigate the nuances of being a multi-line insurance agency. In 2022, the business managed its 90 or so agents through a third-party license management service, adding them as each onboarding class came through. Internally, they matched agents across a spreadsheet to give them an idea of who had been sent to the third-party service and what tasks remained. Once their internal administrative duties were complete, they packaged the information and worked with a popular e-signature tool to collect signatures for contracting.

The agency needed to grow. But the cobbled-together process presented both the regulatory risk that an agent might be out of compliance and the systemic business risk of having very little visibility into who was able to distribute what products and where.

“There was no visibility for the leadership team other than posting a spreadsheet to Sharepoint. It was very manual, and any time we had to remove a license, it was time consuming.”

Jess Blair, Director of Operations for Rate Insurance

The business started their tech transformation by bringing in AgentSync’s flagship Manage platform in 2022, elevating their distribution channel management and providing a complete upgrade to the team’s reporting capabilities. But the process for connecting agents to carrier contracts and getting them appointed remained opaque and muddy. 

It typically took 48 hours for an agent to sign and complete all the e-signature documents. For agents to be successful at their jobs—selling insurance products—they needed critical training with their sales manager. But they had to cut trainings with administrative paperwork, juggling between form fills, e-signature tools, training modules, and time with their new managers.

The business administration team would start an onboarding class on a Monday, giving new agents two days to slog through contracts so the team could review and submit paperwork to carriers by the end of the week. The contracting process left a lot to be desired. 

It wasn’t just the fill and refill work that bogged down those submissions. Blair’s team had to set aside hours for each onboarding class just to review each page of paperwork to scrub apps and make sure the data was clean. Agents would skip sections or leave basic clerical errors. The time penalty of submitting incorrect paperwork was real, with carriers sometimes taking weeks to flag incorrect applications they had held back. Those agents would have to re-apply, slowing their ready-to-sell timeline to a crawl.

“Simple data like background questions or name misspellings would trip up our agents. There was a pile of emails and a pile of contracts, and I think it was overwhelming. Everyone would start to glaze over and we had to do a ton of back and forth to get agents to complete it.”

Jess Blair, Director of Operations for Rate Insurance

Each delay represented a new challenge to retaining agents whose income depends on being able to sell carrier products. And even a quick turnaround came with a communication penalty as agents called or emailed to see where paperwork was in the process.

“That process can absolutely lead to churn rates—agents fall off if they’re stuck without access to tools.” 

Jess Blair, Director of Operations for Rate Insurance

Contracting joins the stack

AgentSync Manage had turned around the Rate Insurance team’s understanding of their compliance and distribution channel management, so they jumped at the opportunity to bring AgentSync’s Contracting product into their tech stack in 2023.

Bringing new technology into the fold isn’t an easy task, and not every carrier Rate Insurance works with has a process that allows for seamless third-party support. To add to the uncertainty, Contracting was a relatively new product on the market. And, while legacy contracting tools tend to segment based on major lines of authority, Contracting can support life, health, and annuity lines as well as property and casualty. Still, Rate Insurance saw the opportunity to resolve this piece of complexity for their agents and jumped at the chance.

“The team was super responsive. If we asked for changes, they took it very seriously and were dedicated to us, very attentive. It was top-notch service from them.”

Jess Blair, Director of Operations for Rate Insurance

Soon, the team was able to see the value of having data from the National Insurance Producer Registry (NIPR) autofill across applications and contracts. Instead of waiting for agents to type their addresses manually into multiple forms and answer every variation of background question known to mankind, agents’ previous answers are threaded through to every contract they’re eligible for.

“Before, there were a lot of manual issues and we knew we needed to either scale up our licensing team or onboard fewer agents. Being able to easily see what an agent has and giving agents access to their own data to see what they have has made a huge difference in the time we spend on the phone or answering emails.”

Jess Blair, Director of Operations for Rate Insurance

Contracting: An onboarding evolution

Agents can apply for multiple carrier contracts at one time. Neither agents nor admins spend hours on repetitive data entry. From the time an agent accepts the Contracting invite until the packet is submitted to carriers, both agents and admins have the ability to see where it is in the process and who it’s waiting on.

“Being able to send multiple contracts for multiple carriers just once saves so much time.“

Jess Blair, Director of Operations for Rate Insurance

And time savings are at a premium (bad-dum ching) because Rate Insurance has grown. The team now manages 210 agents with more than 100 carriers. The speedy onboarding process is now a crown jewel for both recruiting agents and for getting favorable contracts with carriers; being able to commit to a speed-to-premium timeline is a game-changer.

Internal teams, too, have felt the benefits of having accurate data about new recruits and visibility into the entire onboarding process.

“100,000 percent YES, having a data throughline has ended silos. There’s less frustration internally because we’re not spending weeks onboarding agents and paying for licenses only for them to be unable to ever sell and drop off.ves so much time.“

Jess Blair, Director of Operations for Rate Insurance

With Contracting, the agent-to-carrier contracting process is no longer a slog of ad-hoc paperwork fills. Instead, a member of the business administration team schedules a one-hour call with new agents to ensure they log in, answer questions live, and by the end of the call, have a packet waiting for their review in the Contracting portal.

“No more answering repetitive background questions. Instead it’s an exciting time, to just sign paperwork.“

Jess Blair, Director of Operations for Rate Insurance

It’s not just onboarding that has changed, however. When an agent obtains a new license, adding the license to their carrier contract and appointment used to be just as painful as onboarding, with a slog of repetitive data entry and error-prone applications. Now, the team collectively spends five hours a week on contracting “hygiene,” where the push of a button submits new appointment data to an agent’s carriers. 

The team has been excited by submitting for bulk appointments without repetitive data entry. Sharing visibility into the workflow and not having to switch from e-signature to PDF to email to a downloaded state data report and back: Obviously an upgrade. But perhaps the greatest value add is the accurate and up-to-date data that tells the agency, agent, and carrier exactly what states have on file and expect to see.

“I’d say it’s a 99 percent decrease in NIGO because we now have to go fix something maybe once a year. Before, nearly every application required us to go in and change something a producer skipped or mistyped. Now, we have to do that maybe once a year.wering repetitive background questions. Instead it’s an exciting time, to just sign paperwork.“

Jess Blair, Director of Operations for Rate Insurance

Rate Insurance has worked hard to improve the experience of homeownership and insurance buying for their customers, and much of it comes down to embracing the modern insurance infrastructure that can power that experience. With AgentSync Contracting, they can ensure the stakeholders on the other side of the sales process—their admins, their agents, their carriers—realize the value of an elevated experience, too.