By Sharna’ Hines, Service Specialist at Joyn
One of Joyn’s core missions is to create a better way of providing insurance and a far better experience for brokers and customers. Having spent the most recent part of my career on the broker side of the insurance industry, I know firsthand how important and badly-needed this better experience is because I know how brokers think, what they need, and what frustrates them about their interactions with carriers.
Like retail agents, wholesale brokers play an important role in the insurance ecosystem, but they are, for the most part, intermediaries. As such, a lot of their ability to be successful is out of their control: they need retail agents to send them business and they need carriers where they can place the business. If they can’t make that connection quickly, either because the carrier doesn’t respond or another broker beats them to the punch, they lose the business. Like in most industries, losing business is rarely an ideal outcome. Joyn works with both retail agents and wholesale brokers, ideally helping both to place—and win—as much business as possible.
One of the biggest frustrations I experienced as a broker—and one that nearly all brokers encounter—was a lack of carrier responsiveness when brokers send in a submission. It wasn’t uncommon for me to send a submission to ten carriers and only hear back from two or three—with some responses coming a week or more after the submission, if at all. For brokers, knowing just the basic information of whether a carrier can write a piece of business or not so they can move forward or look elsewhere is critical.
I understand that underwriters are busy and are servicing many accounts, but nothing is worse than waiting a week to hear back only to find out that the carrier can’t write the business or it is out of their appetite. That’s one of the reasons that Joyn’s commitment to respond to every submission within 48 hours is so important and such a game changer. It means brokers are better set up for success because they are able to close more business.
Seeing Joyn’s technology in action, too, has been eye opening as a former broker. When a submission comes in, Joyn’s technology automatically extracts relevant information and augments the submission with third-party data that better and more quickly allows underwriters to assess risk, make a determination, and write the policy. I can see firsthand how it saves time and allows underwriters to provide quotes as quickly as possible. And I know that when I was on the broker side, these are all features that would have been exactly what I needed to greatly reduce many of the frustrations I experienced nearly every day.
While I’m no longer on the broker side, I’m excited to bring my experiences as a broker to better help Joyn continue to grow, evolve, and accomplish their mission of becoming one of the most broker-friendly businesses in the industry. If you want to see how we do that, we’d love to chat. Email letstalk@localhost to get the conversation started.
