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Case Study of Iowa Insurance Company using Solutions from Millennium

SITUATION OVERVIEW

An Iowa-based property and casualty insurance provider serving Iowa, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and South Dakota is frustrated by the poor quality and service it receives from a property inspection vendor.

PROBLEMS

Among the issues that the insurance company wanted to solve:

• Improve turnaround on inspection requests
• Improve data accuracy in inspection reports
• Improve customer service responsiveness
• Eliminate the extra costs charged to access inspection data
• Improve profitability through better information

PROBLEMS SOLVED

The insurance company ordered a small sample size of inspections from Millennium Information Services in June 2008 in order to test the company's abilities. By September, the company had begun submitting inspection orders on a continual basis to Millennium Information Services.

In the course of its standard approach to a new customer engagement, Millennium also began to solve the problems that were plaguing this company in near real-time. Unlike many inspection vendors, Millennium only takes a few days to integrate with a new customer, no matter the size of the company or complexity of the workflow environment.

And once the engagement kicked off, Millennium's customer service team began to deliver results that the company had long desired from its other inspection vendor. For instance:

IMPROVED RESPONSE TIME

• 99 percent of all inspection requests have been processed in under 30 days

ACCURACY

• Millennium's attention to data accuracy has resulted in 33% of Insurance-to-Value (ITV) increases, or $4.5M in re-quote potential for the company

CUSTOMER SERVICE

• Millennium's proven customer management policy, which ensures a response to any reported issue within 24 hours and a resolution within 72 hours, has dramatically improved customer service responsiveness since September 2008

COST CONTROL

• Millennium's MAPS platform, which is a powerful data warehouse, has enabled 24/7 access to inspection data, and the company no longer has to pay an extra fee to gain access to this data and can now effectively perform agency management queries thanks to MAPS ad hoc querying tools.

BETTER INFORMATION YIELDS GREATER PROFITS

• Millennium identified inspection findings via the use of referrals that highlighted condition concerns and ITV disparity. These referrals were then grouped based on the company's business rules and identified with a StackLogic designation. Millennium's StackLogic process applied pre-set criteria to categorize and prioritize inspections, identifying policies requiring varied levels of underwriting action.
• As a result, Millennium has helped the company achieve a number of bottom-line benefits, including:
• Of the 366 inspections processed, 89 percent (324) were identified with either ITV only or a combination of ITV and condition concerns
• Within this 89 percent:
  • 114 inspections were identified with a Most Actionable condition concern
  • 168 inspections were identified with ITV only concerns of which 99 have the potential to be re-quoted by the agency, yielding a potential of more than $4.5M in upgraded policies.



BEFORE & AFTER COMPARISON OF PROPERTY INSURANCE VALUES
Current Coverage total	$13,855,898
Replacement Cost total	$18,439,698
RE-QUOTE POTENTIAL	$ 4,583,800

• Millennium's inspectors have completed 50 condition check inspections for the agency, and 66 percent of these were identified with conditional concerns, including 17 with major conditions.
  
  • Major conditions provide agencies with greater opportunity to re-quote a policy, or else to drop the policy if the risk is deemed too great.

CONCLUSION

Millennium immediately solved an unpleasant-yet-crucial series of business problems for the company while also helping it better manage risk.

About Millennium

Millennium Information Services, Inc. is an insurance outsourcing company that provides property inspections along with an array of risk information and underwriting support services to property and casualty insurance companies and their agents. Millennium's various processes allow companies to capture otherwise unrecognized premium dollars by obtaining current and accurate data on the insured risks. By employing the latest technology in all of its activities, Millennium is able to significantly reduce its clients' expenses associated with policy information maintenance. Millennium's products also help increase internal efficiencies by reducing or eliminating paper forms and reports, thereby providing a more manageable working environment. The company works with many of the top regional and national property and casualty companies in the country. For more information, visit www.millinfo.com.