Customer story · Insurance
How Waterloo Insurance is building capacity, removing one bottleneck at a time.
Chris Agness, President of Waterloo, an Austin commercial insurance agency, wanted his team spending less time on data entry and more time with clients. He partnered with Converge to identify one process where an AI co-worker could give his team more bandwidth.
The results
Faster renewals, less re-keying, more time with clients.
Waterloo started with one process: the renewal proposal. Six months later, the team forwards carrier quotes to Pam by email and gets back the proposal, the premium comparison, and the loss analysis in Waterloo’s own format. Figures that used to be re-keyed by hand now come back fast enough that any CSR or broker can pick up a renewal, and the time saved goes back to clients. Here is how Chris describes it.
"If you just look at it like, I need AI for my business, it's overwhelming. There's a ton of products out there. You don't know who to trust. You don't know if it's worth the money."
What the time is for
"We do still need to have a big human touch with our clients. This is a very personal business. And I think that we're able to do that more when we're not being bogged down with the tedious data input."
The challenge
Too much of the day went to moving data.
Every renewal meant pulling figures out of carrier quotes, rebuilding the proposal in Word, and doing it again each time the client changed something. Waterloo already runs lean, so Chris is looking ahead, asking how much more his team can make possible with the right AI tools.
"When I noticed it was really working for us was just the speed at which it was getting things done compared to how we did it before."
"You're going to make mistakes when you're transferring that data, especially by hand."
"It's very easy for anybody, including our brokers, to utilize it pretty quick and get turnaround on what they need."
"They know we don't want to get rid of employees. That's not the point of this. The point is helping them work more efficiently."
The partner
They chose the partner that understood their business and processes.
Chris was hearing about a thousand tools, and had bought software before that didn't get used. "If I'm paying for something, I like to get use out of it, and I've seen that so far with what they've been able to bring."
Built around his agency
"They helped me figure out the specific things within our business that could be helped by this."
Works in email, like a colleague
"My team is used to working with emails, so the fact that it's like just talking to another employee makes it a lot easier to use."
Knows the insurance business
"What helps more than anything when working with them is them having knowledge of how your business works."
How it works
The team emails Pam the carrier quotes. She sends back the renewal package.
Pam is Waterloo's AI Co-worker. When quotes come back about 30 days before a renewal, the team checks them and forwards them with a short instruction. There is no new system to learn.
The proposal
Quotes from multiple carriers combined into Waterloo's own format.
The premium comparison
Last year against this year: pricing and exposures by line of business.
The loss analysis
Five years of loss runs from different carriers in one branded document with charts.
Chris's advice to other agency leaders
"Take it one step at a time and look at specific bottlenecks within your business and try to solve those one at a time."
What renewal work is taking hours from your agency?
Give us 25 min and we'll find one process worth improving. If there's no fit, we'll say so.