Note: This blog post is written for those in the insurance sales and technology industry, the rest of you may not find it interesting. However, If you need an insurance rate quote, please contact me.

This week our local group of independent insurance agents met for our bi monthly agent’s meeting.  One of the topics for discussion was comparative rating applications that we all were using.  There were five agencies represented.

One agency spoke up and said they were trying out a product that I had never heard of called Semcat Quoting Solution.   I immediately came back to the office and did a little research on Semcat and from their website signed up for a 2-week trial.  I was promptly called (less than 10 minutes) by Brandon (did not give his last name) about my inquiry.  He was quick to offer me a screen sharing overview of how Semcat did comparative personal lines’ rating.

In my brief overview (less than 30 minutes) of the Semcat Quoting Solution, I saw several things that I really liked.  They have 100% accuracy.  That is a true statement because they get the rates direct from the company website.   I liked that they can connect with my agency management system Vertafore AMS360.

They have a feature called “pipeline” (sales management) where they can track the sales process.

They track who was quoted, and if they made a purchase or not. They have a module that reports what agents are using the  quoting software, what insuring companies are winning most of the quotes and other helpful statistics about the quoting/sales process. This feature is nice to see who in your agency is using the rater and who is not. These reports are complete with color graphs and charts.

Semcat has a nice and robust password manager for all your partner companies and keeps them in one place for ready access and updating. The service interface was clean and easy to navigate.

They connect to many Internet lead generators such as NetQuote.  I have used NetQuote in the past but the leads I consistently received in my area were poor.

In a nutshell, how their system works is that you enter the rating information into their thin client site/desktop application, and then you open respective tabs  for a insurance company (again inside their thin client software).  When you open the tab for the company that company’s agents portal website appears, and the client data is prefilled to the site.  Very similar to the way a longstanding software Roboform works.  They call this technology “Data Streaming.” Semcat speed types all the information from the data entry screen to the companies’ site.  On particular fields that the information is unknown Semcat highlights the information, and this gives the agent the ability to complete the missing or inaccurate company-specific

Each company is then quoted separately.  Vertafore PL Rater quotes all companies at one time.  This to me is a disadvantage and time waster for Semcat to request each company quote separately, but then again, it is a 100% accurate quote because it is on the insuring companies’ site.

Semcat offers link to capture quote requests from the agency website at no additional charge. When a client completes that form on the agency website, an email notification is sent to the agency and preloaded information is loaded into the quoting engine.  This form does not give the client a rate quote- it only gets their basic information.  Vertafore’s Consumer Rate Quote product does give an auto rate with four of our partner companies immediately. See an example of this working on the GoVaughn.com Insurance site.

Some things that I didn’t too much care for with Semcat was that they require you to install a small thin client application on your workstation and get to their services through that client.  The processing and rating are actually taking place on their servers using a browser they dictate (a customized Mozilla browser). I really like using my own browser either it be IE9, Chrome or Foxfire.  We as agents need to insist that all insurance agency applications be a browser agnostic.  I want to use an Apple Mac Book Pro so bad in the agency.

Semcat also lacks the ability to query and enter automobiles information and drivers in the household.  With Vertafore PL Rating once you enter client’s personal information the site automatically goes out to respective databases and pulls all vehicles (with VIN numbers) and drivers in household (with the birthdays and driver’s license number) into the quoting site.  Agents don’t have to retype or even ask for that information.  This really helps the quoting process go faster since many prospective clients requesting rate quotes do not have all information for every auto and driver in the household. It is now easier than ever to quote a personal lines home and auto.  With the data services that Vertafore PL Rating offers all we need to know to quote both home and auto are:  Name, Address, Birthday and possibly Social Security Number- the rest of the information is entered automatically to PL Rating.

It is true that the Vertafore Personal Lines Rater (true product name Vertafore PL Rater) once was a bad, cumbersome and inaccurate product but over the past two years they have really stepped up to the plate and offered a stellar service to us agents who use it.    Our agency quotes every personal lines risk with this software and highly recommend Vertafore’s PL Rater to any agency looking for a comparative rating solution.  If you are an agency that has not tried Vertafore PL Rating recently you owe it to yourself to give them a second look.

The success of this product is mainly due to the many insurance companies signing on with them to provide real-time rates.  Many of the companies have complained about the exuberant costs involved in getting their systems talking to Vertafore PL Rater.  Some company’s large national companies have even said the costs are well over $100,000.   The companies are putting a lot of money into these systems, and they expect us agents to be using them and quoting all of them every single time.  Vertafore maintains a list of insurance companies that are offering real-time comparative rating.

If you are looking forward to buying a comparative rater for your agency, you might be interested in purchasing The Anderson Report on Premium Comparison Systems, 3rd Edition by Steve Anderson.  Steve writes many publications that review many of the Premium Comparison Systems available to agents nationwide.

GoVaughn.com Insurance has used Vertafore systems since 1974.  The vendor has had many names (Safecom, AGENA, AMS now Vertafore).

Tell me about your agency’s experience using Comparative Raters?

See video below about the Vertafore PL Rating Product.

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