Delaware Valley Underwriting Agency (DVUA) has been in business for more than 50 years and serves agents and brokers from New Jersey to North Carolina. Though it continues to market, sell, and service in traditional ways, the agency increasingly uses its Web site and the Internet to be more responsive to its customers, distinguish itself from its competition, and reduce operating costs.
I had a chance recently to talk with Ed Levy, DVUA principal and Web site and technology strategist. He told me a bit about how the site evolved, where he intends to take it, what’s worked, and what’s been surprising.
Competition among MGAs can be fierce — and other than the rare case in which an MGA has a unique product — its key task is to find and retain agency and brokerage customers. Levy is convinced, with good reason, that retention success is closely connected with responsive service. So overall, the DVUA business strategy is to be very easy to work with and to help agents and brokers serve their customers better.
Evolving Web strategy
Levy reported that the first version of their Web site was little more than an online brochure and an adjunct to their traditional sales and marketing process. But about four years ago he began to focus his attention on the single most important service DVUA performs for its customers — quoting. Though DVUA did a good job responding to requests for quotes during normal business hours, it couldn’t do much for its customers after hours and on weekends, periods when retail agents sometimes needed to respond to their customers with an immediate quote.
Levy also found that for some lines, e.g., Employment Practices, only one in twenty manual quotes turned into sold business. The reason, it turned out, was that agents were quoting primarily to offer the coverage to their customers without really expecting the prospect to buy it. Levy wanted to help its agency partners by providing the EP quotes, but not at the same time expand staff.
Online quotes
So, to provide responsive, all-hours quoting, without significantly increasing operating costs, Levy turned to the Internet and the DVUA Web site, and now provides online quotes for a number of its products. According to Levy, the process has gone well and yielded positive results — especially in the way DVUA has integrated its Web site activity into its agency sales process.
Levy reports that typically an agent/broker can get an online quote in three minutes — start to finish. Speed is important, and to achieve it, DVUA is careful to keep its Web pages simple and fast to load. Contrary to what one might expect, Levy believes that smaller rural agents are more likely to have agency-wide broadband than their city cousins who may suffer with one dial-up account for the whole agency. In any case, DVUA eschews Flash, graphics, and other perhaps visually pleasing, but time-wasting, page accoutrements. In addition, DVUA carefully distinguishes the quote process from the application/submission process and minimizes quote data entry to the extent that it’s possible.
The details of each quoting session are stored by the DVUA system. Among other things, that lets DVUA see how agents and brokers actually use the site, yielding insights that lead to changes and improvements.
The online DVUA quote process yields a PDF proposal the agent/broker can present to his prospect. A copy of the quote also goes to internal DVUA producers. They review all quotes and then follow up with the agent/broker in a way commensurate with the type of business and quoted premium. Sometimes an e-mail suffices; in other cases a follow-up telephone call makes more sense. But in any case, every quote session gets the continuing attention it needs.
The simplicity of the DVUA Web site is illustrated
by this “Products” page. Clicking on a product category
connects the user to more information about DVUA’s products.
Paper versus online submission forms
Levy considers responsive quoting DVUA’s first priority, but not far behind is making it easy for agents/brokers to submit the business and have it bound. Therefore, the DVUA site contains PDF versions of all the forms its agent/broker customers need to submit business. The agent/broker doesn’t need to stock the forms. Simply call DVUA to get one and wait for a fax; it need only go to the DVUA site, find the form in the site inventory, and then download or print it out.
But, why not put the entire form online and let the agent/broker complete it there, and dispense with paper altogether? Levy says it’s really a matter of convenience for his customers. Because his customers often have already entered the application-related information into their management systems, asking them to key it again into his system wouldn’t fly. He’d be forcing his customers into double-entry, something that could turn them away in droves.
But then why not get uploads from his customers? For several reasons. First, because much of what DVUA sells is specialty business and management systems aren’t likely to offer upload for what DVUA needs. Second, even when vendors do offer the right upload capabilities in newer versions of their software, it’s very likely most agents aren’t yet using it.
Levy says that agents don’t mind printing out and then using his applications. The agents simply print out relevant ACORD forms from their management systems, staple those populated forms to the DVUA application and then fill out only those fields on the application that aren’t already part of an ACORD form. So the whole process can be pretty fast and never requires double entry. Of course then DVUA must deal with the combination of data sources that come back from the agency, but then it’s their job to make things easy for their customers.
Though DVUA has made good progress with its site and online quoting, it has encountered some problems as well. Perhaps the most formidable is the volatility of the market and the implications for technology. For instance, DVUA secured a market and went to work building the Web site technology it needed to bring the product to its agents and customers. The project took three months, and immediately before launch, the carrier partner withdrew from that specialty market.
Marketing the site
DVUA is interested in building long-term business relationships with its customers. It has no interest in bringing hundreds or thousands of agents to its site more or less at random. Therefore, it doesn’t attempt to attract agents via search engines or national shotgun marketing. It uses regional advertising, direct mail, and e-mail to bring in the clientele it seeks. DVUA has invested in online quoting for the convenience of its customers and it expects the agents who use its site to be customers; that is, direct business to the MGA. So internal systems track the relationship between quote and submissions. Too few of the latter and the agency gets a call.
Of course, not all DVUA customers are comfortable using the Internet and the DVUA Web site, so the MGA maintains its existing manual systems as well. But according to Levy, times are changing and the trend among his customers is very much in the direction of taking advantage of the DVUA online services.
In the near future, DVUA intends to broaden their online quoting offerings. Farther into the future, the MGA plans to offer policy and claims self-service online as well, but that has to wait on further developments with their internal systems.
All in all, DVUA appears to have done a very good job expressing its business strategy out through its Web site -- to the benefit of its agency and brokerage customers and their customers. And the costs reported to me have been reasonable.
© Copyright 2003 by Sound Internet Strategy. All rights reserved
Speed is important, and to achieve it, DVUA is careful to keep its Web pages simple and fast to load.
…the trend among his customers is very much in the direction of taking advantage of the DVUA online services.