When it comes to selecting carriers to place personal linesbusiness, independent agents look for speed of policy delivery,speed of underwriting decision, convenience and claim services, andprefer to work through a carrier's portal rather than through theirown agency management systems, according to a new survey byNovarica and the Personal Lines Growth Alliance(PLGA).

(Clickhere to hear a podcast with Karlyn Carnahan, principal atNovarica and coauthor of the study.)

The results are part of “How Technology and ServiceDrive Carrier Choice,” a study that looks at 96 PLGAmember agencies of all sizes that write personal lines policies,with respondents including agency principals, producers andCSRs.

According to the III, independent agency writersaccounted for 29.3 percent of personal lines net premiumin 2009, a number that's growing as agencies recognize the need tosupplement soft commercial market revenues with personal linesbusiness. Although strong relationships between agents andcarriers—and specifically agencies and underwriters—are critical,technology is increasingly driving successful personal linespremium production, and can sometimes even overcome aless-than-perfect underwriter relationship.

Eighty different carriers were mentioned in thePLGA survey as one of an agency's top three carriers, and 42 werementioned as a No. 1 carrier, with Travelers Group,Auto-Owners, Chubb, Erie Insurance Group andProgressive as the top 5.

Key findings include:

• A majority of agents (42 percent) prefer to work through acarrier's portal than through the agency's agency managementsystem, although 29 percent have no preference. Interestingly, 38percent of agency principals preferred working through the agencymanagement system, while only 20 percent of CSRs preferred it.Producers had a slight preference for carrier portals.
• Online app submission, online quick quote and onlinefull, bindable quote were ranked as the top three mostimportant capabilities for carrier portals. Agency principals werethe only participants who ranked commission accessas important, while producers rank a full bindablequote as the most highly ranked item. CSRs findonline policy changes as the most importantfunction.
• Top insurers have rich functionality, with more than 80percent of those named in the survey offering theabove-mentioned portal features cited by agents as critical.
• More than half of all agents surveyed use comparativeraters “all of the time” (32 percent) or “most of thetime” (22 percent). Producers are slightly more likely to usecomparative raters when starting a quote, and CSRs are less likelyto use comparative raters; 35 percent of CSRs surveyed reportedthat they “never” use comparative raters when starting a quote,preferring to work through the portal of their preferredcarriers.
• Policy download, application upload andpolicy quoting are critical functions for agencymanagement system integration. Principals ranked the ability toupload an application as much more important than producers orCSRs; produced ranked downloading the policy as most important,while cSRs were most likely to rank quoting policy as a toppriority.
• Agents ranked little to no difference in how satisfied theywere with the capabilities provided by the top three carriers. Allof the capacilities agents seek are offered by the three top-choicecarriers more than 70 percent of the time, with very little gap inwhat these carriers provide their agents. The biggest gap is foundin carriers' ability to quote a policy and claims functionalitysuch as submitting a claim, downloading a claim and inquiring onthe status of a claim.