Bill Carlson with MCA, here to discuss with you the importance of post-monitoring in 2023. When you make a change to your product, how quickly can you measure its performance and effectiveness? In 2023, we believe this is an important capability that all mutual carriers will need. Post-monitoring can be used by carriers to measure a variety of changes they may want to execute.
For example, these changes could include third party data, new factors or segmentation, and new agency management strategies. Post-monitoring is critical to any product change the carrier initiates. It’s important for a variety of reasons. First, it lets you control your result and perform better in line with your expectations and business plan. Second, it helps you identify any issues as they arise prior to becoming a larger portion of your book that’s impacted. And third, helps you better understand the marketplace so you can understand the relationship between changes to your product and marketplace receptivity.
To effectively post-monitor, you need good data from a variety of sources so you can triangulate what’s happening to your book. You need good quote data. You need good information on what competitors have filed. You need good field input.
At MCA, we work with our clients to help establish best-in-class post-monitoring practices. These involve three key elements. Setting clear expectations that are neither overly optimistic nor overly pessimistic. We also like to do this across a variety of metrics so that we can cross-validate our findings. Creating a strong post-monitoring routine, which begins by accounting for the different data sets that we’ll use in the post-monitoring process.
It’s important that we automate what processes we can, and align key meetings to the frequency of updating that key post-monitoring data. We connect our post-monitoring routines to actionable pathways. This allows us to go beyond just measuring our results from a post-monitoring perspective but be able to take that result and make key changes to our product to improve our performance.
Being able to effectively post-monitor product changes will unlock the ability for you to better control your result, identify issues quickly as they arise, and better understand your marketplace. Carriers that are able to successfully implement post-monitoring will gain the benefits from these learnings to drive continuous improvement in their operating results.