An insurance agency now sends certificates in under 2 hours, not a full day

The company

This independent agency sells business insurance from four offices in Colorado. It has 140 employees and about $26 million in yearly revenue. Its construction team looks after builders and trade contractors.

The problem

A certificate of insurance is a one-page document that proves a business is insured. Contractors need one before they can start a job, so every request is urgent.

Requests come from the contractor, the general contractor or the landlord, and each one asks for specific coverage. To answer one, an account manager had to stop their other work, read the contract’s insurance requirements, check the policy and fill in the certificate.

A typical request took 19 hours. The construction team spent 52 hours a week on certificates. And a few went out promising coverage the policy didn’t include: 7 out of 150 that we checked.

What we built

We built a tool that drafts certificates. For every request, it:

1. Reads the request and any contract attached to it.
2. Finds the coverage being asked for.
3. Checks the client’s policy to confirm it’s covered.
4. Drafts the certificate, or flags the request if the policy doesn’t cover it.

An account manager approves every certificate. If the policy doesn’t support what’s being asked for, the request goes to a person and no certificate is issued.

How we built it

It started with a call with the agency’s principal. The next day, a first version drafted certificates for 40 real requests, and an account manager checked each one.

Our engineers spent three days with the construction team and listed the 20 requirements that come up most, like adding the general contractor to the policy as an additional insured. It went live for the construction team on day 8. The other teams kept working the old way.

What changed

We agreed to judge the work by one number: the hours from a request coming in to the certificate going out.

Over the first 8 weeks, across 2,900 requests:

Now 81% of certificates go out within 4 hours. The teams still on the old process stayed at about 18 hours over the same weeks.

What went wrong

Some requests came with a 60-page contract attached. In the first 100, the draft missed the insurance section four times. Account managers caught all four.

Now each draft shows the exact contract wording it was based on, so an account manager can check it in seconds.