Service with a smile is one of the more established precepts of what it means to deliver exceptional client service. So it stands to reason that the long-standing success of the Choice Insurance Agency team is predicated on its commitment to managing the needs of its partners with patience, speed and an unfailingly positive attitude.
Discussing the evolution of this service-first underwriting agency, MD Mark Williams (pictured right) highlighted how the last two decades had seen the firm evolve to become the insurance provider of choice for those looking to place “unusual risks”, outside of the appetite of the larger insurers. Since its early days placing high-risk liability business, he said, Choice has assembled a stable set of A-rated insurers, now boasting eight binders across 20 or so product lines.
Half of that insurer panel has partnered with the firm for a decade or more, he said, with Choice welcoming a few new members in 2022. Meanwhile, a lot of its broker partners have been using the agency for almost 20 years now, with the addition of Chris Clacy (pictured left) as head of sales and marketing in late 2021 introducing a plethora of new relationships with some of the larger brokers and nationals.
“At its core, [our success] is all service driven,” he said. “It’s all friendly and about being a generally nice place to work with. We will answer a call in two rings – with a dedicated underwriter on the other end of the phone. Wherever possible, we try to respond to any emails within two hours whether with a quote or a query, which I think is pretty unheard of.
“That’s getting more difficult, with how busy we are, so we’re growing and we’re taking on new staff… You hear about it all the time across the market, that people can’t get hold of insurers or are on the phone for an hour just to have somebody say they’ll call you back. We hear this every day and we pick up so much business just by being there for people and responding on time.”
For Clacy, who has spent time in the market as a broker and working in development roles for insurers, understanding the value of a timely and comprehensive response comes easily. It has been great fun working with the Choice team, he said, because their service-first vision gives him the scope to go out to the market and make promises that he knows will be delivered.
“No matter the area you sit in, you always hear the same frustrations,” he said. “But because the people we’ve got behind us are so good, I’m almost daring people to call us. If you’ve got a risk, you should just try us as we will work ultra hard to try and write that risk, and if we can’t we’ll try to pass it on.”
Williams highlighted that central to Choice’s ethos is finding placement even for risks or schemes that are not within its own scope. We’ll advise a broker on where to go, he said, because building great relationships is at the heart of the firm’s success – and it sets a precedent for the partnership-led approach that the Choice team take to all their market relationships.
“It’s certainly a lovely part of my job that we’re able to remedy people’s problems really quickly,” Clacy said. “Brokers in the UK, one thing they don’t have is time. Nobody’s got the time to do anything anymore when we live in such a busy environment. These brokers have all built these businesses from nothing and they’ve all got ideas of where they want to be. And if you’re spending half your time on the phone trying to get hold of somebody, you’re impacting how you can build your business.”
That ethos underpins the firm’s growth strategy, he said, as does its conviction that risk is not black and white. So, sometimes you do need to be braver and more open-minded when considering what to write. That capacity to look closer at a risk, beyond the bold print of a claims history or non-standard installation is where he sees that people have started to understand the intrinsic value of dealing with a specialist – a service specialist as much as an underwriting specialist.
“On the flip side of that, you have the evidence that this works from our loss ratios and our longstanding relationships with the insurance companies on our insurer panel,” Williams said. “Our commercial accounts, for instance, have run at a sub 30% loss ratio over the last 10 years, with personal lines running slightly higher but still profitably so, everybody wins with our approach.”
Such simple but effective techniques as customer or partner centricity are often accused of being ‘easier said than done’ but from William’s perspective, “if it’s complicated, then you’re not doing it right”. It should be second nature to build great cross-industry relationships across insurance, he said, and it is embedded in the very DNA of Choice to be proactive and responsive to brokers.
Critical to implementing this has been creating the right team and culture, which Williams noted is made all the easier by recruiting people already on your wavelength. The team at Choice is handpicked because they’re friendly, talented and always willing to lend a hand, he said, and the firm responds in kind by going to every effort to make sure they’re not understaffed.
People’s time is so important, he said, and that goes for the Choice staff as well as their broker partners. So, having the right systems and infrastructure in place to support them being freed up to do what they do best has also been a core area of focus in recent years.
As somebody who joined relatively recently, Clacy reflected on what it means that the business has retained many of its staff for so long, some for over a decade. It’s a fast-paced job market out there, he said, with people moving on and changing roles all the time, so he feels it’s a testament to the internal culture of the business that it retains its top talent while also attracting new blood who want to be part of its journey.
“I think everybody within Choice feels like part of the development,” he said. “We’ve got big plans for the future. I’ve certainly got very demanding plans for what I want to achieve here. But every step of the way, the response has been “let’s just go for it”, which is always pretty great to hear.”
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