Insurance Agencies & Brokerages Solutions

Every independent insurance agent I’ve consulted with describes the same daily reality: they spend 60-70% of their time on administrative tasks instead of selling insurance. They toggle between 8-12 different carrier portals. They manage renewal workflows manually, crossing fingers that no clients slip through the cracks. They can’t be 100% confident they’ve been paid every commission they’re owed.

The irony is brutal. The insurance industry exists to manage risk — yet most agencies are flying blind on the operational risks that kill profitability.

I worked with an agency in Phoenix that lost 3 clients in a single month because renewal reminders went out late. Not because they had bad coverage. Not because the rates were uncompetitive. Because nobody called them 60 days out to start the renewal conversation. Those three clients represented $18,000 in annual recurring commission — gone because a spreadsheet wasn’t updated on time.

The 84% Problem

Here’s the number that should worry every agency owner: the industry average retention rate is 84%. Top-performing agencies hit 93-95%. That 9-11 percentage point gap doesn’t sound dramatic until you realize what it means financially.

A sustained 5% improvement in retention can double an agency’s profit in five years. It’s 3-5x cheaper to retain an existing client than acquire a new one. Yet most agencies treat renewals like an afterthought, spending more energy chasing new business than protecting the book they’ve already built.

The math is simple: if you lose 16% of your book every year, you’re on a treadmill. You have to write new business just to stay flat. You never get ahead.

The Technology Paradox

86% of independent agents say their technology is too slow to keep up with customer expectations. Yet agencies are drowning in technology — the average agency uses 11+ different applications. Applied Epic or AMS360 for policy management. Eight or twelve carrier portals for quoting and binding. Gmail for client communication. QuickBooks for accounting. Google Sheets for commission tracking. Separate tools for COI generation, CRM, compliance tracking, marketing.

The problem isn’t a lack of technology. The problem is that none of these systems talk to each other. You’re not automating workflows — you’re manually shuttling information between disconnected tools. That’s not digitization. That’s just adding more places to copy-paste.

I’ve watched CSRs spend 15 minutes generating a single certificate of insurance because they had to log into a carrier portal, find the policy, fill out the ACORD 25 form, download it, and email it to the client. Multiply that by 10-50 COI requests per week, and you’re looking at 5-15 hours of work that could be automated to under 5 minutes.

The Cross-Sell Blind Spot

9 out of 10 insurance customers prefer to buy all their insurance from one provider. Yet the typical agency client has only 2.5 policies when they could easily have 4-6+. Why the gap?

Because agents have no idea when their clients’ lives change. A client buys a house — that’s a homeowners policy opportunity, an umbrella policy conversation, maybe a higher auto coverage review. A client has a baby — that’s life insurance, possibly a 529 plan discussion. A client starts a business — that’s a whole suite of commercial policies.

These aren’t cold leads. These are existing clients who already trust you. But without a system that tracks life events and triggers outreach, the opportunities disappear. The client goes to Geico’s website for the homeowners quote because you didn’t call them first.

The revenue sitting on the table is staggering. If you improved your policies-per-client metric from 2.5 to just 3.0, you’d increase your book value by 20% without acquiring a single new client.

The Commission Reconciliation Nightmare

Here’s a conversation I’ve had with at least a dozen agency owners: “We can’t be 100% confident we’ve been paid what we’re owed.”

Commissions arrive 30-60 days after a policy binds. Sometimes carriers are months behind on statements. Policies get canceled without notification. Commission splits are complex when multiple producers touch an account. The earning agent sometimes gets overlooked on the carrier’s statement. Manual tracking across spreadsheets and AMS entries creates errors.

And incorrect commission sheets are one of the fastest ways to break trust with your producers. If they think you’re shorting them — even if it’s an honest mistake — the relationship fractures.

Yet most agencies are still reconciling commissions manually, cross-referencing carrier statements against AMS records, hunting down discrepancies, and hoping they catch every error before month-end close.

What Actually Works

The agencies I’ve seen successfully escape this chaos don’t rip-and-replace their entire tech stack. They don’t wait for Applied Systems or Vertafore to build the perfect integration. They orchestrate the tools they already have.

Renewal workflows that automatically trigger 60 days before expiration, pull policy data from the AMS, draft client-specific emails, and log every touchpoint. Commission reconciliation that flags discrepancies between carrier statements and AMS records without manual spreadsheet cross-checks. COI generation that takes an inbound email request and delivers the certificate in under 5 minutes. Cross-sell triggers that detect when a client mentions a life event in an email and queue up an outreach task.

These aren’t moonshot ideas. These are workflows that connect the tools you’re already paying for — your AMS, your email, your calendar, your accounting software — and make them work together the way they should have from the start.

The goal isn’t to become a technology company. The goal is to stop wasting 60-70% of your day on admin work and get back to what actually drives an insurance agency’s value: building relationships, advising clients, and protecting the 84% you’ve already got before you chase the next new policy.