It’s that time of year again and you’re not sure if your current agent is finding you the best rates, coverage, or giving you the level of service you desire?
You tell yourself that your current 
agent has been doing an OK job, but let’s keep him honest and ask another agent or two to present quotes as well. Maybe a new agent came to your office or called you on the phone with promises of lower rates, better service, and an exclusive offer. Many times, you take one of these routes because the industry has taught you insurance is a bidding war and you need to constantly shop your insurance around. From an insiders standpoint, let’s look at 4 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Ask Multiple Agents To Quote Your Business Insurance!
1. Renewing your insurance is already a major time constraint
If you handle your companies insurance renewals, whether its Property, Casualty, or Employee Benefits, you know the extra time you have to spend gathering information during this time of year. Not to mention the calls from the agent, requests for meetings, questions from clients, vendors, etc. Adding more agents into the mix during your renewal will lead to you having to spend more time fielding the questions and gathering the data. You should be working with an agent that saves you time and stress, not looking for more to make your life more hectic and stressful! This should be the first reason why you shouldn’t ask multiple agents to quote your business insurance.
2. Your company’s reputation
For most of us, reputations are an important part of life. It corresponds with our ability to be trusted, meet new people, what people think of us, and depending on what we do, our ability to be successful in our professional lives. This is no different for a company and the business it conducts. Reputations matter even when we talk about purchasing insurance. What I mean by this is that insurance carriers tend to keep records and data on everything, especially companies they have quoted for in the past. Underwriters also have long memories when it comes to accounts they’ve quoted multiple times, but have never been able to bind.
Underwriters and their insurance carriers do not like to “practice quote” every year. What do I mean by that? Well, if an underwriter or carrier sees your company is requesting quotes every year, but never binding coverage with them, they will eventually start moving your applications for coverage to a special stack on their desk. This is not the priority stack, not the stack they are going to jump through hoops for to offer special coverage or pricing, and not the stack that is going to get you a quote sooner than a few days before your renewal. From their standpoint, the application has become a low priority because their chance of working with you seems to be a very low percentage.
What happens if you need their coverage, pricing, or help one year? The insurance companies you have done this too in the past will remember and your agent will have a hard time getting you the deal you should be getting. This is another great reason why you shouldn’t ask multiple agents to quote your business insurance!
3. You Should be working with a professional, not a product salesmen
When you think about your insurance agent, do you put him or her in the same circle as your attorney, CPA, or company executives? If you do, do you also bid out the services of your attorney, CPA, or management team? My guess is you don’t, so why would you do that with your insurance agent? If you’ve selected an agent who is professional, has your desired level of expertise, and your trust, there shouldn’t be a reason to hassle with multiple agents every year.
The agent you choose should provide you with the experience and industry knowledge to not only put together a program that covers your risk, but also puts together a competitive price for the coverage. If you have a great agent, but are just trying to “keep him/her honest”, then getting other agents to offer quotes will only hurt their chances of putting together the best program! This perfectly sets up…
4. When it comes to property and casualty insurance, you can only get one quote per carrier
Outside of employee medical benefits, most carriers will only offer to quote for one agent. This means you can’t ask two different agents to go to a carrier and see who gets the best price…they won’t do it! On top of that, it doesn’t matter who the agent is, if they submit your application first, they will be the one to negotiate with that carrier. In the insurance industry, this is called “blocking markets”. Unfortunately, this leads to many dishonest practices among agents. Far too often, agents will submit incomplete or inaccurate information in order to block a carrier off from other competing agents. This can lead to gaps in coverage, carriers binding based off of inaccurate information (which is fraud because you as the company representative signed off that it was accurate when you signed the application), and expensive errors that have to be corrected.
Further, this can stop a good agent from accessing valuable coverage for your company. Don’t you want to work with a professional you trust and not the first guy to submit a mystery piece of paper to a carrier? This is the most important reason why you shouldn’t ask multiple agents to quote your business insurance!
Hopefully the 4 reasons above make sense and will allow you to become more strategic with your insurance and risk management programs in the future. Not every agency operates from the same playbook, give us a call today and we can walk you through how we can help design you a risk management blueprint just for your business.
Dean and Draper
Dean & Draper is a Trusted Choice insurance agency representing over 200 insurance companies. For over 36 years we have offered a trusted freedom of choice to our clients. ContactUs.
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