Executive Insights: Diving Deeper Into Data

In the summer of 2021, roughly six months after Quility was founded, I began diving into conversations about how the quality of the relationships between Quility and its carriers affects client satisfaction and agent success rates. So often, companies rely solely on net promoter scores—single question surveys used to gauge client loyalty and enthusiasm. And while there’s certainly value to that metric, it provides limited insights into the upstream factors and nuanced information that, ultimately, affect those scores and are crucial to a company’s long-term success and evolution.?

With this in mind, my team and I set out to create a new metric, the carrier promoter score, which provides a holistic report of carrier performance and data that can be used to establish benchmarks, spark constructive conversations, troubleshoot and accelerate mutual goals. We knew that if Quility was going to continue designing the future of insurtech … continue placing high-value solutions into the hands of agents and policyholders with speed and ease … we needed to bolster our long-standing carrier relationships and fine tune our collaborative efforts.??

The first step in developing the carrier promoter score was to define a series of both qualitative and quantitative key performance indicators—hard and soft data points that would allow us to accurately grade and rank our carriers. The vast majority of Quility’s business is conducted with its top-performing carriers, and so they became our sample group for the purpose of research and development.?

On the quantitative side, our KPIs focused on things like placement and renewal rates, commission rates, and speed of deposits and underwriting.?

To collect qualitative metrics, we enlisted the experiences and opinions of agents who regularly interface with our carriers’ customer support teams, personnel and company infrastructure. We also canvassed Quility staff from our contracting, conservation and agent support teams who work, day in and day out, with carrier software and data. ??With our survey questions defined and grading system in place, we had our first external carrier promoter score meeting, with one carrier, in April of 2023. That carrier provided such positive feedback, we pressed forward and met with an additional four carriers in August of the same year. Today, we have a total of six top-performing carriers fully engaged in the program and plan to expand throughout 2024.?

By working intentionally with our carriers, we’ve been able to better illuminate pain points, collaborate on solutions and align on strategies. Quility may be on the cutting edge of technology, but for that technology to be put to best use … for everyone to benefit from its development … the human-to-human relationships need to be nurtured and the lines of communication need to stay wide open.??

For an initiative still in its infancy, I’m thrilled to report Quility’s carrier promoter score is producing impressive results and confirming what we already knew—relationships matter and qualitative data is a valuable, often overlooked input that when intentionally mined and accurately interpreted, can drastically improve business, support customer allegiance and help everyone come out on top.?

Brendan Hoyer is the Vice President of Finance – Products/Divisions at Quility, and previously, served as Chief Financial Officer for Symmetry Financial Group (Quility’s subsidiary). Additionally, Mr. Hoyer holds an MBA from Western Carolina University and is a licensed certified public accountant in the state of North Carolina.??

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