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GuideOne Insurance (Des Moines) has launched GO BOP, an online quoting portal to provide accelerated service to agents for the growing small business insurance segment. The Guide One Business Owners Policy portal delivers instant quotes and binds business in eight small business categories in as little as 10 minutes. The portal opened for six states on Nov. 14 and will expand nationally during the coming year.
GuideOne now writes business owners policies for churches, contractors, distributors, offices, real estate, restaurants, retail and service businesses. Optional coverage for cyber is available and includes cyber exposures like identity recovery, data breach, computer attacks and extortion in one form. Agents will know a client’s eligibility within fewer than 15 questions on two screens thanks to GO BOP’s third-party integrations that pre-fill data and support underwriting decision-making.
Stephanie Grobin Small Business team leader, GuideOne.
“GO BOP asks just 15 appetite and eligibility questions because that’s what agents asked of GuideOne—a quick, easy process for writing business,” comments Stephanie Grobin Small Business team leader, GuideOne. “We only ask questions specific to the type of business being quoted; we don’t ask for information unless we need it to produce a quote.”
Integration with Third-Party Sources
GO BOP’s ability to limit questions and quickly turn around quotes is based on GuideOne’s integration with third-party data sources, according to Grobin. “Much of the information we need for BOP is in the public domain through county assessors, tax information and so on—we’re prefilling information about the business and property based on name and location,” she says.
“When an agent is prospecting, GuideOne can return a lot of data that is onsite verified by our vendors, including prior loss information,” Grobin adds. “The agent would be required to input data in the rare instance when we don’t have it via our integrations.”
In order to maintain its promise of quoting and binding in 10 minutes, GuideOne used performance monitoring technology from AppDynamics (San Francisco), according to Dave Beving, Director, Applications Development and Enterprise Architecture, GuideOne. “It gives us visibility into real-time portal transactions and allows us to continually monitor and enhance the customer experience.”
Dave Beving, Director, Applications Development and Enterprise Architecture, GuideOne.
Knowing that meeting the 10-minute time requirement meant that the data entry required for a quote had to be minimal, GuideOne selected the MuleSoft (San Francisco) integration platform to quickly build integrations to both on-premise applications and third-party vendors. “With MuleSoft, we were able to connect our enterprise applications, data and new vendors, and eliminate the need for custom point-to-point integration code,” Beving explains. “An added benefit: the ability to create restful service middle-tier architecture. This allowed us to decouple our custom portal from Guidewire PolicyCenter.”
Next Steps: Live Chat in Pilot
In further pursuit of ease-of-doing-business, GuideOne has implemented and is currently piloting live chat, Beving relates. “This allows our agents to receive live assistance for their questions about the product, underwriting, and the GO BOP portal navigation,” he explains. “Once the pilot concludes, we plan to release this functionality to all portal users. In addition, we are actively reviewing all questions and answers so that we can build chat bot functionality to answer commonly asked questions instantaneously.”
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