Making coverage more available to your small business clients

When small businesses come to your agency seeking workers’ comp coverage, they don’t always give you much (if any) lead time. They might need coverage to start work on a project or to hire employees right away. We got feedback on our most recent agent survey indicating some agents have run into challenges with our service center when we would only offer coverage to start the day after our proposal was released.

To make coverage more available when there is a pressing need, we're changing our underwriting guidelines to allow same-day coverage in some circumstances. Although same-day coverage cannot be guaranteed without underwriting the risk, we have empowered the insurance reps in our service center to make those decisions on small business applications.

Here is what we’ll need:

• On Step 9 of saifQuote, on question number 8, select “yes” to refer the application to an underwriter and indicate same-day coverage is needed.
• Provide a brief synopsis of the reason for their urgent need, which could be:
  • They need to hire workers right away.
  • They need to start working on a new project.
  • They just found out workers’ comp coverage is required.
• Provide a statement signed by an owner, officer, or member of the business acknowledging, “We are unaware of any injuries to workers or owners that have occurred on the proposed effective date of coverage.” This can be done via an email from the business to servicecenter@saif.com.