McMichael Insurance is a trusted independent insurance agency offering a comprehensive range of insurance solutions, including Personal, Business, Life, and Medicare Insurance, to clients across the United States. With nearly 50 years of industry experience, McMichael Insurance has continuously grown and evolved, catering to diverse clients of all sizes. Despite its expansion, the agency remains committed to providing the same personalized care and attention to detail that has been its hallmark since its inception.
McMichael Insurance Agency offers multiple insurance services to numerous commercial clients this includes helping them review subcontractor information that subcontractors submit to our clients. A part of this process involves ensuring COI compliance. This is done to ensure that the insurance requirements in the subcontractor agreement are being met by the subcontractor. However, this process is often cumbersome and demands significant manual intervention, resulting in agents devoting several hours daily to meticulously verifying the accuracy of every detail within the COIs.
The primary challenge lies in accessing AMS data and seamlessly integrating it with the COI solution for efficient receipt and management of COIs. McMichael recognized the need for a solution that could streamline data management, simplifying certificate compliance processes. This would empower agents to improve service delivery to their clients, elevating customer experience and increasing overall customer retention.
Gerald McMichael, President at McMichael Insurance Agency, said “The previous integration between our AMS and COI solution posed significant challenges. Establishing a seamless connection between the two systems was complex and not readily available. Additionally, our COI solution lacked the capability to track endorsements and other changes in AMS data, leading to a delay in Certificate updates. As a consequence, our agents were forced to manually review COIs to ensure they accurately reflected the most current information.”
McMichael highlighted a scenario where a client opts to include a $5 million umbrella insurance requirement in a specific subcontractor agreement. In such cases, if the subcontractor agrees to adhere to the new requirement, an agent must manually obtain the subcontractor’s COI and verify the presence of the $5 million umbrella insurance coverage. Without the right certificate management systems and processes in place, there is no way to determine if the subcontractor is truly compliant with their certificate requirements and subcontractor agreement.
Synatic and Certificial collaborated with McMichael Insurance Agency to seamlessly integrate their AMS with Certificial’s COI Network, streamlining and automating their COI management processes. With the newly established connection, agents could effortlessly review subcontractor certificates to ensure alignment with their client’s subcontractor agreements. What’s more, the integration was built to automatically renew certificates, keeping them up-to-date with the latest information.
McMichael stated, “The COI solution has effectively saved each of our ten agents approximately 2 hours per week in managing COI requests. This translates to 520 hours annually, amounting to approximately $10,000 in savings per year. These significant cost and time savings enable us to reallocate resources to more critical areas of the business. Considering that the combined Synatic and Certificial solution comes at no additional cost, these savings directly impact our bottom line.”
In addition to enhancing COI and resource management, Synatic and Certificial empowered McMichael Insurance Agency to leverage the data submitted by subcontractors in their certificates.
This valuable information enabled McMichael to proactively approach subcontractors and convert them into new clients, expanding their client base and fostering new growth opportunities.
McMichael emphasized, “With real-time access to certificate data, we can swiftly detect changes in the insurance landscape and capitalize on them immediately. For example, if a carrier discontinues service for a specific class of business, we can promptly identify this change in the certificates we issue. This enables us to strategically target those businesses and offer our services, which has proven to be a game-changer for our agency.”
McMichael Insurance Agency discovered that clients who partnered with them reaped numerous downstream benefits from their dedication to enhancing not only COI management processes but also various other insurance processes. As a result, many of the agency’s clients were perceived as less risky to do business with, as they were insured by an agency continually prepared to adopt and embrace new technology and processes.
Synatic, Certificial, and McMichael Insurance Agency share a common belief that innovation transcends simply speeding up existing processes; rather, it involves pioneering new methods that propel the industry forward.
McMichael stated, “I’m impressed by the synergy between all three of us in dismantling technological barriers within the insurance industry. There’s immense potential for Synatic and Certificial to revolutionize the certificate issuance process, offering clients a superior certificate management experience.
"Bringing data together and leveraging it to automate insurance processes has been a longstanding challenge for us. Synatic and Certificial have played an instrumental role in providing the necessary tools to overcome this challenge, and their support has been invaluable," said Gerald McMichael, President at McMichael Insurance Agency.
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