NIG looking forward to “exciting year” after successful eTrading performance

After a very successful rating in this year’s Insurance Times eTrading survey, where its eTrading platform scored five stars out of five, NIG hopes to continue its success over the next 12 months.

Director of broker eTrade, Jaime Swindle said: “We have a full and exciting delivery schedule for the coming year, including a further enhanced journey on TheHub as well as ongoing improvements in our product performance, quotability and propositions to meet the needs of our customers.”

“We are thrilled”

Swindle said the result is very encouraging for the company.

“This really demonstrates our platform, products and most importantly service not only meet but exceeds the expectations of our brokers and delivers on our strategic ambition to be effortless to trade with.”

Speaking of improvements made to the insurer’s eTrade platform, TheHub, Swindle said it had enhanced its property owners wording to include average free as well as “expanding the appetite of our Business Package and Retail products.”

Speeding up the process

According to the Insurance Times eTrading Survey, 46% of the 761 brokers had to wait half a day or more for an eTrade referral to be cleared, but Swindle explained that NIG has cut its referral time significantly over the past year.

NIG was given a fantastic five star rating for its referral process and expertise, coming out on top of all the competition, and that is something Swindle has attributed to continuous hard work.

“Whilst we work continuously to reduce the number of referrals our brokers experience, there will be instances where a referral is necessary, either driven by us or by the broker and speed of response is key to being effortless,” she said.

“We aim to work in as close to real time as possible and have multiple ways in which to manage referral contact with dedicated teams servicing calls, live chat and online referrals.

“We have a dedicated, highly skilled underwriting team supporting our eTrade products and platforms.”

“Being able to speak to an empowered underwriter when you have a referral, or need some support, is important and over a third of our underwriters have increased their levels of authority in the past year – meaning they are able to deal with your query there and then.”

One dominant route?

When comparing the rise in popularity of trading with an insurer via an extranet or a software house platform, Swindle envisages a move to trading within the brokers’ own systems but says that extranets still have an important role to play

She said: “The investment and development in to software house trading has moved on dramatically over the past few years and we have seen a significant increase in the demand to trade via the brokers’ to trade in their own systems. This is due to the benefits of comparative quotes, single key processing and back office integration.

“However don’t write off extranets yet! They still provide a very real benefit to both insurers and brokers with the ability to really develop a bespoke journey, more flexibility in terms of the presentation of risks and data and other functionality outside of case level trading.”

Lines of communication

One thing found in the survey was that brokers wanted an open channel of communication. And while the option of a live chat was encouraging, they felt the wait times and lack of resources was frustrating.

But Swindle says NIG’s live chat option has been very successful for them, with great satisfactory numbers.

She said: “We take hundreds of chats every day from our brokers either via TheHub or via their software house.

“We have a very experienced team of underwriters dedicated to online chat who have had specific training on this channel and regularly receive customer satisfaction scores of 100%.”

One comment from the survey rated NIG’s online chat system as “very helpful,” with another broker saying “TheHub is very easy to use and easy to speak to an underwriter if necessary.”