THE CLIENT
A nationally distributed children’s furniture manufacturer.
THE PROBLEM
Their experience modification (XMOD - losses compared to industry average) was 303% which means they were paying over 3 times as much for worker’s compensation -- to the tune of $2MM per year.
We coordinated the carrier’s risk management team with our own claims manager to form a plan of attack. Upon further investigation, we identified multiple claims that the prior carrier had failed to close out in a timely fashion (some carriers are notoriously lax about closing and fighting claims).
Within six months, we were able to reduce the company’s XMOD to 161, resulting in immediate savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars to the client. Through continued claims management and staff training we were able to complete the year with an XMOD <130, in effect saving the insured over $1MM at their following renewal.
AT Griswold & Griswold Insurance Agency (aka GXG), we know that insurance is a commodity you can purchase anywhere, but not just anyone can do what we do. With a history of over 70 years of excellence, we understand the differentiator is the agency’s service, knowledge, and expertise, which is why we’ve formed a highly qualified and driven “strike team” of specialists that will go to extreme lengths to protect your assets and operations.
Griswold & Griswold Insurance Agency:
Insurance. Intelligently.
Being an agent isn’t only about working one on one with clients, it’s also about educating the public about insurance whenever possible. Some of our staff provides free classes on a variety of topics to community groups and professional associations as part of that education outreach.
After teaching an hour long class on Cyber Liability to a group of fraud examiners, two of the attendees approached one of our agents. As it turns out, they were Assistant District Attorneys from a city near where she was teaching the class, and they wanted to let her know that the class’s content -- going over the different types of fraud that can be covered by a typical Cyber policy, and how businesses can protect against privacy breaches -- gave them new avenues to investigate on some open cases that had been baffling them; they knew that some sort of fraud had been committed in these cases, but hadn’t been aware of what to look for.
Our agent provided them her contact information so she could continue to consult as necessary, and in February one of them let her know the good news – thanks to the information they got from the class, they’d been able to bring indictments in one of the cases they’d mentioned.
BESPOKE Coverage
MORE than once we’ve had to use unconventional means to procure appropriate levels or types of coverage for our client. Take the pharmaceutical consultant who was required to have $15MM of Cyber Liability coverage as per her contract with a major retailer. Due to her status as a sole proprietor start-up, most carriers initially would only offer $1-2MM, or $5MM at their best. Through careful negotiation and with our carrier partners, we were able to leverage multiple offers to create a “stacked” policy of $5MM policies from three separate insurers, enough to satisfy her contractual requirement.
We have also been able to create “customized” insurance policies for our clients. We have a law firm that needed a very specific type of legal protection coverage which simply does not exist in the U.S. as they needed it. We were able to directly approach a Lloyd’s of London stakeholder to assist in building this exact coverage specifically for the client.
DAMAGE CONTROL
ONE of our agents was contacted by a CPA to come in and assist one of his clients who had insurance costs spiraling out of control. After meeting with the client, he discovered a number of issues that were caused by their current broker using some very common unethical tactics to retain the client and continue earning commission. They were on a Pay as You Owe workers comp payment plan so they would pay more when they were busy and less during the slow season.
The broker had changed them away from this method to a monthly flat rate and underreported their payroll to make the up-front price seem lower. The client was hit with a $20,000 bill after the payroll audit was completed. The broker failed to update the new policy after the audit meaning the client would have been hit with another $20,000 unexpected expense the following year. We were able to correct the payroll and soften the blow by spreading out the additional premium over a longer period of time.
Another issue they were facing was a problem employee who was getting rear ended in company vehicles and employing an injury attorney to receive six figure workers comp settlements. We were able to set them up with an HR service to advise them on how to best handle this problem employee without violating any labor laws. The client did not have an in-house HR person and could not afford to hire one. Now they have access to live HR professionals 24/7.
We set the client up on a damage control plan to get their costs down and educate them on how to manage risk moving forward so they are less likely to have unexpected expenses.
RISK Management
ONE of our clients, a mid-sized HVAC contractor, came to us with a litany of concerns that weren’t being addressed by their broker. One of these problems was frequent claims issues, to which the broker’s response was to continually shop the account with different carriers rather than identify and correct the source of the claims.
Upon investigating further, we identified employee driving habits as the most frequent and severe claims source. To correct this, we partnered with a vehicle telematics system to proactively monitor employee driving habits, and implemented an ongoing supervisor education and claims review protocol with our claims manager.
To round out their oversight and to prevent other sources of claim, we provided additional services from our toolkit including:
- OSHA compliance to bring them up to date with filing and reporting requirements.
- HR services suite to assist with managing a problem employee and ensuring proper training and onboarding.
TURNKEY Services
WE were approached by a newly formed trade organization looking for ways to provide additional value to their members. They felt they could increase membership dues if they had more to offer. We were able to provide them with co-branded services including OSHA compliance software (at no cost to the members) and developed an association-based employee benefits plan, which was a boon to their smaller members that struggled with benefits costs. As many of their members were new in business or smaller companies, we also offered access to our HR technology platform for compliance, training, and live HR assistance.
In addition to these immediately-available turnkey services, we are also currently working on a long-term project to collect data in order to build a specialized, industry-specific insurance program to cover some of the currently uninsurable aspects of these member businesses (we’d tell you more but then we’d have to kill you).