Liberty Mutual Agent for the Future Digital
Innovator winners share tech insights
By Christopher W. Cook
Adapting AI and other technology in an insurance agency can be an overwhelming task. There are many shiny objects and buzzwords to keep track of. It can be difficult just figuring out where to begin.
Last year marked the first time in the Liberty Mutual Agent for the Futuretm awards that there was a tie between two agencies in the category of Digital Innovator. To switch up our Technology feature this month, instead of focusing on a firm and its offerings, we’re going to hear from leaders of those two agencies and how they’re using technology in their operations, as well as their advice on getting started with adopting tech in your agency.
Getting started
For Schaumburg, Illinois-based Rate Insurance (the December 2024 Rough Notes Agency of the Month), understanding the agency’s needs, goals and vision is pivotal to getting started.
“Come up with your vision first in terms of how you want to use technology to grow your business and then set specific goals,” says Jeff Wingate, president of the 280-person agency. “It won’t be one single solution that will solve all your problems; it’ll be multiple pieces of a tech stack that come together.”
Ryan Haggard, senior vice president of product and technology with Rate, adds that it’s important to stay focused. While executives from different departments all sought to have their specific problems solved, the agency created an executive governance group to rank projects based on the agency’s needs. “Focusing on a particular project or two at one time was much better than focusing on 20, and you need to have patience; technology doesn’t happen overnight,” Ryan says.
The agency started by dissecting and documenting its sales process, looking for areas where technology could be injected to improve its sales volume. “You need to know the end-to-end process and then identify friction points,” Ryan says.
After evaluating vendors that were either too expensive or solved only part of its problems, Rate opted to build its own operations platform, focusing on keeping things simple at first. “We focus our technology builds on the minimum amount of work we can do to test the functionality,” Ryan says. “We didn’t go into a back room for four years and come out with a new application that improves sales by 4x or 5x. We spent two or three weeks building a very bare-bones solution. Then we added bells and whistles. Once we’re several iterations in, it’s an unbelievably different product than it was when we first rolled it out.
“Our product managers bring 10 to 20 years of insurance experience, and our engineers design and build the cloud architecture underneath it: the microservices, the data layer, and the real-time API integrations with our carriers and Salesforce,” he adds.
Nailing down agency processes was also an early step for the team leaders at Everett, Washington-based McClain Insurance Services (the 2014 Rough Notes Agency of the Year), who agree that starting small and focusing on individual challenges can make things less overwhelming.
“Using a calendar tool drove our clients to schedule appointments with us, so we removed phone tag.
Using a texting tool, we made sure clients saw that our emails were sent.”
—Nick Pembroke
Agency Principal and Co-Owner
McClain Insurance Services
“It might be a texting tool, or [for us] it was the adoption of a scheduler like Calendly,” says Nick Pembroke, agency principal and co-owner of the 11-person shop. “Using a calendar tool drove our clients to schedule appointments with us, so we removed phone tag. Using a texting tool, we made sure clients saw that our emails were sent. We also created templates of emails that we send consistently; from there, we used technology that automates those templates.”
“We nailed down our processes, and not just what Nick was hoping everyone was doing, but what was actually happening day to day,” adds Meghan Pembroke, McClain’s communications director and co-owner. “It doesn’t do us any good if we have a vision of how a certain process is supposed to look, but nobody’s actually doing it because they don’t quite understand it or they don’t know where to find the resource.”
With new technologies helping the entire team, it’s also important to include everyone with decisions. “We find a lot of agency owners looking at technologies that their teams just don’t adopt because there’s discomfort,” Nick says. “We’re very careful, especially through some trial and error, about getting the team involved.”
“We want to make sure that whatever we’re adding and having our team learn is going to benefit them, and that it’s actually solving something that they are dealing with,” Meghan adds.
“Come up with your vision first in terms of how you want to use technology to grow your business
and then set specific goals.”
—Jeff Wingate
President
Rate Insurance
When investigating new tools, talking with other agencies who use the product you’re interested in is also vital. “We do the little spiels with the technology providers, but then we also talk to agencies,” Meghan says. “It’s one thing to hear from the person trying to sell it to you [compared to] seeing how it’s actually being used.”
Tech tools
For Rate Insurance, it was all about adding speed to business transactions.
“From the time somebody called in and requested an insurance quote, it would take 30 minutes per carrier [for the quoting process], and if you’re presenting four carriers, [that’s] two hours,” Ryan says. “Now, through integrations with our CRM and platforms that have API integrations with our carriers, we’re able to present multiple quotes, not only home and auto but underlying products like flood, umbrella, and earthquake in just a few minutes.”
The agency also focused on ease of use for its service team, building service functionality into its CRM backed by its customer platform Rate Connect. “Policy actions are now one or two clicks, not a dozen steps across multiple screens,” Ryan adds. “We’ve nearly doubled the number of policies per agent by reducing the amount of time people spend navigating the technology in order to process changes.”
“We want to make sure that whatever we’re adding and having our team learn is going to benefit them, and that it’s actually solving something that they are dealing with.”
—Meghan Pembroke
Communications Director and Co-Owner
McClain Insurance Services
“Our agents can now have much better conversations with their customers versus asking for information or spending time re-entering data into a carrier’s website,” Jeff adds. “Before, our sales and service teams were operating in separate platforms. Now, sales and service for personal lines is all integrated into one platform, so everyone can see exactly in the file what the other person is doing, who they spoke to, and what marketing campaign was driven.”
Rate Connect also tracks producers’ commissions and is used to pay agents. While Rate custom-built its core agency management system, it does use parts of Salesforce—tracking leads and identifying sales opportunities—as its CRM. All of the agency’s applications, infrastructure, and databases run on Amazon Web Services.
“AI is able to evaluate data in ways that we weren’t able to before. We’re finding trends and
patterns that allow us to be more effective on every phone call that we make.”
—Ryan Haggard
Senior Vice President,
Product and Technology
Rate Insurance
The agency also uses AI to transcribe recorded calls, redacting personal information and summarizing them. “We’re able to document all of those in a bulleted, summarized fashion,” Ryan says. “That was instrumental because a lot of our agents would forget [to document discussions on phone calls]. We’re also using AI to orchestrate the emails that we get for service. We summarize the emails, determine what the request is, and then make routing and assignment decisions based on AI.”
An AI voice agent was recently launched to contact customers coming up for renewal and it has shown early success. “We’re seeing a 30% connect rate, and 15% of those folks that we talk to end up wanting to talk to an agent,” Ryan says. “It helps us make sure our customers know that we are paying attention to and care about their renewal.”
Rate’s business teams also use AI to study agent call behavior: which times work best, how many attempts it takes, and what kind of voicemail gets a customer to engage. “AI is able to evaluate data in ways that we weren’t able to before,” Ryan says. “We’re finding trends and patterns that allow us to be more effective on every phone call that we make.”
McClain Insurance Services utilizes tools from several vendors while also developing its own internally. When it comes to organizing its processes, McClain uses an online whiteboard site called Mural, which Meghan refers to as a “visual flowchart that links processes together.”
After each individual process is completed on Mural, it is brought before the team to see if there are any objections or changes needed. “They’re easy to change. So if, say, in a service huddle, it comes up that some of the agents aren’t understanding what they’re supposed to do with a particular type of client request, once we hammer it out and everybody’s on the same page, we can go into Mural and change it,” Meghan says.
“We only define the processes of how McClain Insurance does things uniquely; we’re not defining how to get into a company portal because that’s not under our control,” Nick says. “It’s how we send a claims card, how we reach out to clients when their policy is pending cancellation, how we do our renewal review process, how we do our application processes, and then the audit expectations on those applications.”
Taking things a step further, the processes on Mural are fed through its built-in AI to create McClain Brain, the agency’s AI agent. Nick says: “McClain Brain is an internal resource. It’s a closed loop system so it can’t pull any information from the outside internet, and if it doesn’t know the answer, it says ‘ask Nick.’”
“It reflects everything that we’ve put into Mural, as well as our templates,” Meghan adds. “We want to have a lot of different ways for our agents to be able to learn and reference our processes, depending on how they learn best.” She adds that it’s been a beneficial training resource after the agency hired three new service agents and one sales agent recently.
Other tools McClain uses are Canopy Connect, which provides an option for clients to “start a quote” from a link on the company’s website, and Loom, which is used to create video proposals for quotes. The agency also utilizes AI tools like Ring Central AI Notes to capture and summarize conversations, specifically regarding different coverage offerings during the application process, and Eventual Treasury, an AI‑powered revenue operations platform for insurance agencies that automates carrier statement processing, commission reconciliation, and revenue recovery.
With Eventual Treasury, automatic logins to carrier sites are performed three times a day and documents are pulled. A service ticket is created for the agent assigned to the specific client task, and AI will send it to the correct process in the agency management system. “All the agent has to do in some cases is drag and drop that service request into a specific stage, and it’ll automatically send out an email to that client,” Nick says.
The implementation of new technology doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Remember, agencies help other agencies, and these two Liberty Mutual Agent for the Future Digital Innovators could have more insights to share. Happy tech-ing.
For more information:
Agent for the Future
agentforthefuture.com
McClain Insurance Services
autohomeboat.com
Rate Insurance
rate.com/insurance
