Insurance Rating Software

The future of insurance is difficult to read and regulatory and economic trends will keep insurers on their toes for the next several years.

In the face of all this, insurance shoppers still want fast, accurate quotes that can adequately cover potential expenses. Insurers, then, need to automate the process to avoid risk and provide the best service.

This guide is designed to help agencies find the right software to achieve this task.

We'll cover:

What Is Insurance Rating Software?
Common Insurance Rating Software Functionality
Benefits of Insurance Rating Software
How Much Does Insurance Rating Software Cost?
Important Considerations When Purchasing Insurance Rating Software

What Is Insurance Rating Software?

Insurance rating functionality is typically included in an insurance suite, which helps agencies and brokerages handle their daily tasks.

In addition to policy and claims management, billing and analytical features, rating plays an important role in generating quotes for clients. Users enter details about a customer—in the case of health insurance, things such as age, gender, tobacco use, medical conditions etc.—and the system will produce multiple quotes based on preset underwriting rules.

A dashboard view of rating tasks in Applied Rater

 

Common Insurance Rating Software Functionality

Rating software for insurers offers a few common features you're likely to find in most modern systems. These include:

Multiline, multistate rating	Most rating engines are capable of generating quotes for various types of insurance, such as commercial, property and casualty, health and life.
Automated verification	As customers offer information, agents can have much of the information verified with tools in the system—credit scores, addresses, age, vehicle mileage and more. This helps insurers offer more accurate quotes and minimize risk.
Carrier integration	Integration with dozens of carriers enables you to provide several quotes for each customer.
Comparative rating	When you integrate many carriers with your system, you can offer multiple quotes and compare them by entering customer information into fields on a single screen instead of manually typing data into each carrier's system.
ISO rules integration	Since data is crucial to generating accurate rates, insurance companies usually need to get that information from an outside source such as the Insurance Service Office (ISO). Rating software can integrate the ISO rating solution to provide the best quotes based on sufficient data.
Reporting and analytics	Reporting features help agencies gather and analyze data generated from all their activities, including providing quotes. Many suites offer a full role-based dashboard to view and manage key performance indicators, along with the ability to produce custom reports for carriers or other departments.

Benefits of Insurance Rating Software

A strong insurance rating engine can significantly streamline your operations and save you time for other tasks. Some of these benefits include:

• Smoother workflows. With an automated rating solution, your agents can serve a customer using a single screen to enter information and offering multiple quotes much more quickly than with a nonintegrated system.
  
• Increased rate accuracy. Rules-based algorithms use a variety of factors to produce the most accurate quotes, and web-based systems include the most up-to-date rates available.
  
• Increased revenues. Customers looking for the best insurance rate will be happy to receive a list of the best rates for their needs and are more likely to come back when they need additional coverage.

How Much Does Insurance Rating Software Cost?

Insurance software vendors that offer full suites don't often offer their pricing details online, as they'd like to get potential customers on the phone for a trial before discussing costs. Also, for an accurate cost estimate, it's important to get more information about the needs of an insurance provider.

For stand-alone rating engine products, however, pricing tends to be more straightforward. Most comparative rating engines are priced on a subscription model, with a preset cost per month.

Keep in mind, these prices may be tied to a specific number of users, office locations or number of compatible carriers. The upfront cost, whether on-premise or cloud-based, could include an additional setup fee.

Finally, many vendors will offer a few versions of their software designed to fit a certain type or size of agency, with a different set of features and capabilities to handle their specific needs.

Carefully evaluate these different pricing models and added costs to meet the functionality and budgetary requirements of your company.

Important Considerations When Purchasing Insurance Rating Software

Before you start evaluating insurance rating systems, consider the following factors that will impact the success of your software implementation:

Deployment: Cloud-based or on-premise? Modern software buyers have a couple options when deciding how to deploy their new investment.

• Web- or cloud-based software (also known as Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS) is increasingly common and preferred by many buyers—the system is installed on the vendor's servers and you access it via a web browser.
  
• On-premise software is installed locally on your own computers. Some businesses prefer this method for security reasons, though without a strong IT presence, a cloud-based software vendor is likely able to better secure your data.

Integration options. While very often included in a full insurance agency management system, many agencies are opting for a stand-alone rating engine for customization and agility characteristics. In this case, it's important to find out whether the system can integrate with your existing agency management software or customer relationship management (CRM) platform.

What state are you in? As you may know, not all insurance carriers are available in every state. As a result, the number of compatible carriers you can integrate will depend on the state your business is in.

For example, California, Illinois and Texas tend to have the most compatible carriers in many insurance rating engines, while Hawaii, New Hampshire and Rhode Island often have fewer.

Ask any software vendors you're evaluating for a list of carriers available in your state, so you can find a system that allows you to offer your customers the widest variety of rates.