Florida Peninsula Grows with Business Process Outsourcing

Unlike most traditional insurance carriers, Florida Peninsula is a relatively young company writing business in a single, somewhat risky market — Florida homeowners. In fact, a hurricane made landfall in Florida the week after the company acquired 35,000 policies from the state joint underwriting association in 2005.

From the beginning, Florida Peninsula was organized as a virtual company without all the baggage of legacy systems, a large staff and paper-based processes. Business process outsourcing (BPO) was a key part of that strategy, but after a few years in operation, the Boca Raton-based company needed to find a new outsourcing vendor.

“The biggest reason we started looking around was we didn’t have the flexibility with the old system to drive change,” said Chris Chandler, director of Operations, Florida Peninsula Insurance. “We decided it was time to overhaul our Internet services to our agents. We had a fully functioning Web portal with online quotes and applications, but our agents were telling us that the online process was taking too long.”

Agile Operations, Automated Underwriting

Under the agreement, CSC’s business process outsourcing operations in 2008 began providing services to Florida Peninsula agents and policyholders including quoting, underwriting and customer services. Behind the scene, CSC maintains the company’s policy administration system, agency portal as well as ISO compliance. This allows Florida Peninsula to focus on managing new business, sales force, claims and financial statements with only about 60 full-time employees.

“We’re able to keep our overhead to a minimum for both our personnel and facilities,” Chandler said. “Instead of managing individual people, our management team can focus on growing the company and generating products to help us meet that goal.” Since CSC began managing the company’s processing operations, customer retention improved by 5 percent. Using CSC’s Agency Link software, the company launched a new, more robust Web portal with faster quoting, streamlined online applications, automated underwriting and a full range of other services. Since then, the company experienced more than a tenfold increase in quoting — from 2,000 to 35,000 quotes a month. With this increased quote activity came a surge in new business.

Saving Time and Money

Endorsements have similarly become an efficient electronic process. In most cases, endorsements can go through with no underwriting review. Insureds can change addresses, mortgage companies and payment plans or add and subtract coverages in real time. Agents can go online and attach supporting documents, make down payments and check on the status of policies.

Brent O’Quinn, owner of the Ormond Beach-based O’Quinn Insurance Agency, is a leading writer of homeowners business at Florida Peninsula. He has made the transition to Florida Peninsula’s new Web portal, and says he appreciates the savings in time — from 15 minutes down to 5 minutes.

“The old system wasn’t built with the user in mind,” O’Quinn recalled. “You had to go through multiple screens and when you finally got to the end, you’d get error codes and then you’d have to go back and try to find what you missed. The new portal is much more intuitive.” Every extra minute spent getting a quote impacts agency staff. O’Quinn cited the difference that a carrier’s automation can make in his agency. “We’ve got 12 people who give about 650 quotes a month, and if you’re spending an extra 10 minutes on every quote, that comes out to 6,500 minutes — more than 100 hours,” he said. “That’s wasting a pretty good amount of my money every month.”

Sharing Innovative Solutions

In a relatively short period, Florida Peninsula has become an active member of CSC’s large client community.

“It’s been very beneficial for us to interact with other CSC customers and to hear about their implementation strategies, the products they’re working on and the enhancements they’re planning,” Chandler said. “Obviously we’re always looking for fresh and innovative ideas for our own systems, and we’re sharing what we’re doing, too, in hopes of improving products for our customers.”

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