28 Feb How Does Your Division Rate?
The recent February 7 blog asked, “Am I better today than yesterday?” Hopefully, that resonated with many of you and was given extensive self-reflection. As many of you know, when Angie, Mishell, or I visit you, we discuss virtually all of the insurance-related divisions within your agency. I tend to ask, “How is the division better than it was a year ago?” Since achieving consistency is and should be a major goal within each division, the focus of this blog is more at the division level.
With 2023 now upon us, hopefully, your division has made some E&O resolutions to strengthen your E&O loss prevention approach. If not, consider this, possibly discussing it at your next staff meeting. Ironically, I often find that when I ask the staff where they want (need) to improve, they know. Hopefully, this will surface during the discussion. So, with that as the foundation, where is your division’s weak link? What are the one or two areas your division should work on? Maybe something such as:
- Consistency. How consistent are the various processes being performed among the staff? Is everyone following the procedures; is there a staff member doing their own thing when and how they want to?
- Handling of Diary Items. Is the workload manageable, or is it overwhelming for some staff? When diary/suspense items are not managed on time, this increases the potential for E&O matters to develop. Encourage “swamped” staff to speak up and ask for help.
- Documentation. Since documentation is one of the most critical issues determining the direction of an E&O matter, how does your division rate the commitment to ensure that all communication involving a client’s insurance program is documented and retained in the client file? It is best to subscribe to the saying, “If it is not in the file, it didn’t happen.” A key issue is ensuring that, when appropriate, documentation should be memorialized back to the client in some form of written communication.
- Exposure Analysis. This is often called “the closest thing to a silver bullet in preventing E&O claims.” E&O claims typically result from a client suffering an uninsured loss, so by working with your clients to help them understand their exposures, your agency can offer insurance solutions to those exposures. Ensure your proposals include a section addressing “other coverages to consider, including, but not limited to, the following.”
- Policy Checking. How strong are your policy-checking workflow and attention to detail? Many an E&O claim would not have occurred had agencies been more diligent in their policy-checking process.
So how would your division rate? How well do you compare against other divisions within your firm? By going through this process and exercise, hopefully, some “deficiencies” were identified and will soon be on the path to correction. I would think the last thing you want to happen is for your division to be the one that generates an E&O claim.