Commercial Lines Next Up for Mobile Apps?

Striving to keep the agent at the center point of communication, existing mobile insurance apps give policyholders easy access to agency contact information, create home inventory reports, store auto/home policy information and photos or fill out an auto accident report.

Notice anything? The majority of features in today’s apps not only simply store information, but also serve primarily personal lines needs.

Could the next app evolution focus on commercial lines?

“We certainly have on our road map a more commercially based app,” says Matt Aaron, co-founder of Blue I—a third-party company that started development of the Insurance Agent mobile app for independent agencies in 2012. “When you ask agencies right now, ‘Where’s your No. 1 need regarding commercial policies?’ It’s with certificates of insurance—that’s the No. 1 thing agencies are consistently asked for by their commercial clients.”

Certificates are just the tip of the iceberg for commercial features. Other potential functions include:

Claims. Steve Cote, president of Chalmers Insurance Group and adopter of the Insurance Agent app, mentions features such as “having the ability to register the claim, a GPS tracking feature that shows the date, time and location of the claim and being able to take photos and send them directly to the claims supervisor.”

Policy changes. Although this client service requires agent interaction, “you have to have it verified anyhow,” explains Kiki Johnson, co-founder of the Insurance Agent mobile app. “So what’s the initial step you may want to take through a mobile app to facilitate engagement?”

Mobile payments. Aaron calls this a mobile moment ripe for opportunity: “someone’s trying to pay you money, so make it easy.” Johnson agrees, adding that agents are missing out on up to 12 client touch points a year and that this feature “allows them to have the customer captive within their app, see what their customers are doing and follow up with the customer, recognizing if they did send or are late on a payment.”

Risk control. This would involve the ability to either “contact a particular risk control representative directly to inquire about mitigation or link into different sites directly that might be able to help them,” Cote says.

“Agencies need to look at this now because if they wait, they’ll follow the wave,” Johnson says. “They want to be on the front-end of that and in control of their client engagement.”

Morgan Smith is IA assistant editor.