About
An innovative next generation product specifically designed for today’s landlord with best-in-class coverages, discounts, ease of doing business, and pricing!
Innovation presentation
CSE Insurance group is a regional multi-line underwriter of property and casualty insurance that distributes through independent agents. One of its products is ‘dwelling fire’ which insures a landlord’s interest in homes owned and leased to tenants. This segment is served by the insurance industry with ‘dwelling fire’ product that marginally meet customer needs. CSE aspired to design “the best-in-class” product based on today’s Landlords’ needs across various dimensions of coverage, rates, processes, and ease of doing business.
The project involved various departments including product management, actuarial, underwriting, claims, legal, compliance, IT and marketing. The post implementations teams also include sale by independent agents and agent territory managers.
We implemented the product effective Feb 15 2016 in California. Since the launch, new production is up 111% premium, and 143% policy count! Retention has gone down, but only by 7 percentage points, which is better than expected and more than made up for by better risk quality and more new business. Agents new business quote time went from 7 minutes to 2.5 minutes and application time went from 15 minutes to 10 minutes. In a survey contest across 350 independent agencies, landlord product was rated as the best product in the USA market
The product also recently received the Gold Medal Award by Best in Biz for the "Best New Version of the Year" across several industries. Also, CSE has been selected as ‘Celent Model Insurer’ for innovation on Landlord product.
Uniqueness of the project
During the design of the product, we listened hard to our customers and analyzed the market using a 5 C’s and SWOT analyses. We met focused customer groups to deeply understand their current pain points, needs and expectations from an insurance product. Based on feedback from our customers and rental property managers, we designed Eviction Reimbursement coverage (copywrite pending), an offer unique to CSE. We also ported over coverage from other product lines but not offered by any carriers in the Dwelling Fire space such as: Service Line, Equipment Breakdown and Bedbug Remediation coverage.
Our product is also designed in alignment with our company policy of “We are good policy people”. It does not include hidden exclusions that are occasionally found in our competitor’s products.
To simplify coverage offering for our insured, we bundled coverages in to three tiers: Basic, Plus and Premier. Our policy administration system is designed to select all the bundle packaged options with the click of one button.
With regards to rating and pricing, CSE is only the 3rd carrier in CA to use a predictive model to rate landlords. This predictive model approach is recognized as an industry best practice and gives CSE a significant competitive advantage in better matching the price to the insurance risk of loss. Also the product offers the most discounts in the marketplace.
Product features are communicated to our customers with colorful collateral, along with a letter from our CEO for a personalized touch. We would consider this project as an incremental innovation that provides lot of value to the today's landlords in the market. Landlord insurance is the flagship product of the company. CSE has a book of 28K landlord policies and $18 Million premium revenue in CA.
