Insurance Update
Insurance update from Matthew Palmer, who’s had insurance, what we’re going to talk about is Goosehead and what type of companies you guys write insurance form because you guys are not you’re not a captive agent. We’re going to talk about what happens if you have a service question or a billing question or you just want to go ahead and talk to a good person. Who would you call? And how can you compare plans for other people if they are considering and they might want to switch or consider a different price? Go ahead, Matthew. Tell us about Gousse head and who you guys write for.
Guys had insurance. So Juicehead is one of the biggest brokerages in Texas for insurance. We work with over forty five different carriers in the DFW area and in the state of Texas. That’s really our prime market. We’re working on expanding. We’re all over the nation right now through our agency channel, what that kind of looks like.
And Kyle Worth will be championing this himself here in about a year, is that juicehead agents have the option of starting their own franchise, going out into the big wide world and owning their own business in that. But right now, I’m a corporate agent with you, which means I’m working at the main offices. I’m surrounded by these really high expert individuals who can teach me a lot juicehead as a company.
Those 45 companies that we work with, our names that, you know, they’re the Progressive’s nationwide Allstate, Liberty Mutual. It’s essentially a glorified middleman and it takes a lot of the onus off of your client to shop around their insurance and try and find whichever company is going to give them the best price for the coverage that they need instead. That’s something that they can say.
OK, Matthew from Goosehead, he’s going to take care of this for me. He’s going to advocate on my behalf rather than trying to make State Farm or USA or whoever the most money. And not that I have any problem with those agents. And that just sort of is a big value add to the client experience. So it’s been a really rewarding process as far as looking at the individual companies that we work with.
You said it’s not working with Fred lawyer or the general dotcom. You know, we’re doing business with only very financially stable AI rated carriers in the insurance world. And what that means is we kind of get to treat insurance like a bank. And I’m the guy who goes to bat for you at the bank. So we write the coverages for our client and we’re a full service agency.
So what Mike was saying, when you have questions about your coverages, you need to file a claim. You have a billing issue. Maybe we change our mortgagee, are lean holder on our car. That’s something that goes through your agent. Right. Rather than calling in and saying, hey, my windshield’s a little bit damaged, I might want to get this looked at something I see all the time. And insurance writing auto insurance. I’ll run a past claims history report. I’ll see three or four zero dollar claims.
That’s on a house or on a car. That’s really frustrating for me because what that means is you’re having clients call in to their captive agent and their agent is saying you’re thinking about filing a claim. All right, let’s get this process started. And they make a notation of that and that affects their rates moving forward. So it’s just having the independent channel working through.
You said there’s a lot of benefits, kind of like what we just talked about. And I would say the biggest one is that your agents independent, your agent is your agent. It’s not advocating for any specific company, but for you.
So let’s go back to that zero dollars claims that maybe also mean that it was denied or just that they didn’t find it financially.
So most of the time, what is your claim is Mike is driving his jeep, shatters the windshield of my car, has a thousand dollar deductible on his comprehensive coverage for his car. And if you don’t know what any of those words mean, shoot me a message. I’m happy to explain.
So a Jeep is a four wheel outdoor vehicle that drives these out Mustang and just shatters the windshield, OK? And Mike calls his insurance company and they send somebody out and they say it’s going to be eight hundred dollars to replace this because you have a thousand dollar deductible like you’re paying the whole thing. So that’s a zero dollar claim because the insurance company didn’t pay Mike anything, but they noted that he had a claim, which means he’s more likely to file a claim in the future, just looking at statistics and so he gets a higher rate.
Wow. OK, thank you. And so we talked about servicing and billing and kind of what’s going on there and how often should a person have their insurance compared and consider something different?
That’s a tough question to answer. How often should you I would say two to three years, every two or three years, shop around your insurance, call your broker or your agent and say, hey, is am I still at the best place? The reason I say it’s a tough question to answer is everybody’s comfort level is different. I’ve written insurance for clients who have been with the same company for twenty five years and that they have, even though they’re paying too much, which they’re paying too much, they know their company really well.
They know, hey, if I need to file a claim, this is what it’s going to look like. And insurance, risk evaluation, all of that is about what makes the client comfortable. Right. Whether that’s getting the absolute best price or being with one company for 10 years that they trust and No. That’s my job as the insurance agent to figure out why are we looking for the best price when we get a shot this down year over year, or is this something that we want to take care of once and not think about for 10 years?
If I was a client of yours and I put insurance with you for the first time and you have all my information, is that something that you would look at over time and do that for us just to make sure that we’re always consistently in the best possible coverage?
So Goose Head right now is not doing that. The two things that we can look at in the future, the goose that’s doing that, I’m really excited about. And this is. We announced this yesterday, so this is very new at the press. That’s right.
Can you even talk about this?
I couldn’t yesterday, but now I can. All right. Juicehead is doing in two things, right? The first is that we are starting to look at the analytics. He said, as a company is a very innovative technology.
Guys, you’re amazing.
Yes, I it’s one of the biggest reasons I got in with and is that they are somebody who is at the cutting edge to Goose Head is looking at the analytics of when we reshape clients. So we’re saying, hey, how much does a client’s premium have to increase for them to statistically on the average, for them to call us and say, hey, my cost for for my insurance year over year just went up three hundred dollars, right. Or 20 percent. Yeah, right. Where is that metric?
If it’s a five percent, do we want to proactively reach out and reshape them or are they pretty happy still if it’s 30 percent right, that’s something they probably worried about. And looking at those analysts, we are starting in the next couple of months to proactively reach out and reshape our clients just to ensure they’re still at the best place, especially with, you know, everything with covered all of the reconstruction costs and material costs going up. We’re seeing a lot of premium increases. February did not help that.
Yeah, for Sure. The cutting edge thing I’m talking about, because I am really excited to share this with y’all is Goose Head is rolling out a program called Digital Agent. And what that is, is they’re the same way you can go on progressive dotcom or Geico or one of these direct client to company carriers and get a quote, Juicehead is rolling out their version of that for the independent market. And what that means is it’s it’s I encourage all of you to go check this out, say, you know, just say referred by Matthew Parmer, go to Juicehead Dotcom. The top right says get a quote.
And in 30 seconds you can get a home and tentative auto quote and it’ll say, here are the top 10 companies. Right. And here are tentative rates based on the cars you put in the house that you put in the coverages we would recommend and then it says, here is your agent, give him a call. And so that for us means that when the client goes in, if Mike’s know, looking at reinsuring his house and he’s like, oh, what’s going on here? I get a notification. I say, Mike and Mike a questo is started, a quote.
And I have all of his information. I have the quotes right there. I can jump in and get on the phone with him finalizes, say, hey, here’s my best. Right, and here’s what I would recommend. And then you start having that consultative customizing experience.
Very good. So that sounds very, very similar to the experience you might have if you’re shopping for maybe airlines or something along those lines like hotels. And it’s kind of like an aggregator putting that all together. So that’s good. Gives me more visibility. Absolutely. Into what’s going on. And I think that’s an important point. What we’re seeing with Juicehead is that we have to change the way we do business. The the consumer nowadays is not somebody who wants to go one place and get one rate.
They want to have control over the process. Your realtor, you know this because your clients are all over Zillow. They’re scouten houses and they say, here’s what we want. Right. They want their terms on their level. And that’s something that nobody else is really doing right now. Besides the independent channel for insurance, every other company saying here is what you have to do. And so saying here is the choice model. Here’s what you can have.
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Matthew ,Goosehead , Mike Acquisto
