Business Interruption Gap Leaves Clients, Agents Exposed
Remarkably, a Safeco survey of small-business owners found that more than half had no business interruption insurance and dont know much about the coverage.
The independent, national poll of 500 firms with fewer than 100 employees revealed that 55 percent did not have business interruption policies and that nearly two-thirds were unfamiliar with the coverage.
In the past, weve called on independent agents to cross-sell employee benefit products from the life and health side of the industry to their commercial accounts. The goal would be to deepen their relationship with clients, expand their premium base and improve retentions as well as better serve their clients complete coverage needs. We did not think it was necessary to prod producers to cross-sell a standard property-casualty line like business interruption.
Is business interruption a hard sell? It shouldnt be, not when history shows how damaging a shutdown can be for a firmeven a relatively short one.
At the very least, this is a terrific opportunity for agents to be true risk managers, explaining the exposures insureds face if their businesses are shut down for any reason. At worst, those agents who fail to make their clients aware of this exposure and their coverage options could lose accounts to more thorough competitors and face errors and omissions exposures to boot.
Reproduced from National Underwriter Property & Casualty/Risk & Benefits Management Edition, October 31, 2003. Copyright 2003 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.
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