Insurance Agency Grows Book, Handles Renewals Faster

When Erik Loesch first moved to historic Charleston, South Carolina, he began working for Prudential Financial. While the focus at the company was on life, health, and annuity products, he realized that his true interest lay in the property and casualty lines. When Prudential sold its book to Liberty Mutual and exited the business, Loesch decided to forge his own path. He launched the Atlantic Shield Insurance Group in 200, and welcomed business partner Ryland Shaw a few months after opening.

Today, the agency has nearly 30 employees, and was recently named National Agency of the Month by Rough Notes. Like most, the firm is managing through the COVID pandemic with a workforce that is largely remote, and Broker Buddha has been an important part of making that successful. But Loesch remarked that he turned to Broker Buddha as part of an overall effort to make operations as efficient as possible.

Out with PDFs and Faxes, In with Online Smart Forms for Insurance

Loesch describes Atlantic Shield as a “coastal agency” and, as a result, the firm has a large percentage of business with contractors that is Excess & Surplus, in addition to Supplementals. The renewal process has been a constant source of frustration at the agency.

In the past, Loesch noted, account managers and producers were forced to piece together applications from all kinds of sources, “...PDFs, JPEGs, faxes—all manner of documents that make things more difficult than they should be.”

When the administrative work is time-consuming, the demands on his people stack up. Reducing the hours his team spends on mundane detail work means the agency can scale without constantly adding new people.

Loesch says, “If I can save time for account managers and producers, it means I don’t have to go out and find more people as quickly, and landing good people is always a challenge. And I want to keep growing our book—not our overhead.”

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Even the tech-resistant have adopted it.

Despite the many benefits, Loesch will admit that Broker Buddha wasn’t immediately embraced by everyone at the agency.

“The software is really intuitive, but change is hard and some people always doubt technology in a business that is built on relationships. But once a few account managers started to use it, everyone saw how much it helped productivity. Today, several of my people say they couldn’t do their day-to-day work without it.”

And what about Atlantic Shield customers? Loesch said that it wouldn’t make sense to continue on the platform if it wasn’t embraced by his client roster, so he reached out and received nothing but positive feedback, remarking that, “...even some of the more tech-resistant had quickly adapted to it.”

Onboarding done right.

Loesch credits the onboarding process for making transition to the platform seamless. He was quick to praise the Customer Success team, noting, “The support we get is fantastic. They are very responsive and demonstrate that they want to be a true partner in our success. The communication is always clear, and we don’t have to wait long to get answers to any questions we might have.”

Loesch recently added White Glove Service, and plans to leverage the software for even more efficiency going forward.

“I’m always looking for technology that solves problems for us, and Broker Buddha has definitely done that.”

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