Retention rate: 86% → 97% · Timeframe: 12 months · Additional premium retained: ~$2.1M · Staff count: unchanged
When 86% Retention Isn't Good Enough
Eighty-six percent sounds respectable until you do the math.
For a mid-Atlantic MGA managing an $85M book of business across commercial property, general liability, and specialty lines, a 14% annual attrition rate translated to roughly $11.9M in non-renewed premium every year — a figure that was eating producer compensation, straining carrier relationships, and quietly threatening two of their carrier appointments.
The agency had three experienced producers, a capable CSR team of six, and an AMS they had been on for years. The problem was not talent. It was not market access. It was not even price competitiveness.
It was timing. Accounts were slipping away before the agency had a chance to fight for them.
🔴 The core problem: By the time a non-renewal signal appeared, it was already too late. Clients had gone to market, found alternatives, and moved on — often without a single outreach call from the agency.
What Was Actually Breaking Down
The agency's VP of Operations spent three weeks reconstructing their renewal failures from the prior year. The pattern was consistent:
- Renewal reminders lived in a patchwork of calendar alerts, sticky notes, and a shared spreadsheet that nobody owned
- With 800+ active policies split across three producers, there was no systematic way to know which accounts were at risk at any given moment
- The legacy AMS held policy expiry dates, but generating a useful renewal pipeline report required manual exports and pivot tables — a process nobody had time to run weekly
- When a producer did reach out, there was no logged record of the contact, so coverage review documentation was inconsistent and E&O exposure was real
- Two E&O incidents in the prior 12 months had already prompted a carrier compliance review
The agency was not failing on individual accounts because producers were inattentive. They were failing systemically because the workflow depended on people remembering things that a platform should track automatically.
👉 One of their top carriers had formally flagged the agency's persistency ratio and scheduled a review for Q2. Losing that appointment would have meant surrendering access to a key market in their region.
Why They Chose EbixASP
The agency evaluated three platforms over a six-week period: Applied Epic, a regional AMS they had been referred to by a peer agency, and EbixASP.
Applied Epic was ruled out quickly — the implementation timeline was quoted at 6–9 months and the per-seat cost was prohibitive for a 40-person shop. The regional platform had solid core features but no native carrier data feed integration, meaning renewal dates still had to be entered manually.
EbixASP won the evaluation on a specific capability: Carrier Connect's direct policy feed integration. Renewal expiry dates, policy numbers, carrier assignments, and coverage details could be imported directly from carrier data rather than re-keyed by staff. Combined with the Renewal Automation module — which could trigger multi-step workflows automatically from those same expiry dates — the agency saw a path to a renewal process that didn't rely on anyone's memory.
Migration from their legacy system was completed in 28 days, with a parallel run for the first two weeks to validate data integrity before the team cut over fully.
The Implementation, Step by Step
Step 1 — Centralize the Policy Data Layer
Before building any workflow, the team ran a full policy import through Carrier Connect. Every active policy — carrier, line of business, expiry date, account contact, insured name, premium — was pulled into EbixASP's Policy Manager in a single batch.
The immediate effect was visible within the first week: instead of opening three spreadsheets and cross-referencing calendar reminders, any team member could pull up a live renewal pipeline in seconds. The shared spreadsheet was retired on day eight.
✅ Outcome: One source of truth. Zero manual data entry to populate renewal dates.
Step 2 — Build the 90-Day Renewal Workflow
With clean data in place, the operations team configured a four-stage automated touchpoint sequence in Renewal Automation. The logic triggered automatically from the expiry dates Carrier Connect had already populated:
📅 90 Days Out
- Account manager assigned in Policy Manager
- Internal task created: begin coverage review
- Manager notified via dashboard alert
📅 60 Days Out
- Automated email to insured requesting updated exposure information
- Task logged in Client Manager contact record
📅 30 Days Out
- Second email to insured if no response logged at 60-day stage
- Internal escalation task created for producer
- No-response flag visible on renewal dashboard
📅 7 Days Out
- Manager alert if policy still open with no bind confirmation
- High-priority task assigned to ops manager
- Account flagged red in renewal health report
✅ Outcome: Every renewal had an owner, a timeline, and an escalation path — automatically.
Step 3 — Embed E&O Compliance Into the Workflow
The agency's prior E&O exposure came from inconsistent documentation: coverage reviews happened but weren't always logged, and recommendations made verbally were never recorded.
The fix was straightforward. The team configured the renewal workflow in Policy Manager so that a "Coverage review documented" checkbox was required before a renewal file could be marked complete. No override, no exception — the system simply wouldn't close the file without it.
This meant E&O compliance stopped being a separate process that relied on discipline and became a byproduct of completing the normal renewal workflow.
✅ Outcome: Zero E&O incidents in the 12-month implementation period, down from two in the prior year.
Step 4 — Surface At-Risk Accounts in the Weekly Dashboard
The operations manager built a custom "Renewal Health" view in the Reports module. The logic was simple: any account with no activity logged within 14 days of receiving a 60-day reminder appeared on the report in amber. Any account at 30 days with no bind confirmation appeared in red.
Every Monday morning, the ops manager spent 15 minutes triaging this report and reassigning stalled files. That 15-minute triage replaced what had previously been a 2-hour weekly spreadsheet reconciliation — and it was more accurate, because the data was live rather than manually compiled.
✅ Outcome: At-risk accounts identified 30–60 days earlier than under the old process.
Step 5 — Close the Loop With Carrier Connect
The final step addressed a problem the agency hadn't fully quantified before: double-entry errors on bound renewals. When a renewal was confirmed, staff had previously updated both the AMS and the carrier portal separately — a process that introduced occasional discrepancies and had contributed to at least two coverage gap incidents in the prior year.
Once Carrier Connect was configured for outbound policy updates, a bound renewal in EbixASP automatically pushed the updated policy record back to the carrier feed. The separate portal update was eliminated.
✅ Outcome: Double-entry errors eliminated. Coverage gap incidents: zero in the implementation year.
Results at 12 Months
The agency pulled their annual retention report 12 months after go-live. The numbers were unambiguous:
📈 Retention & Revenue
- Policy retention: 86% → 97%
- Additional premium retained: ~$2.1M
- Non-renewal rate: reduced by 79%
⚙️ Operational
- Renewal processing time: down ~60%
- E&O incidents: 0 (vs. 2 prior year)
- Coverage gap incidents: 0
🤝 Carrier Relationship
- Carrier persistency review: resolved
- Carrier confirmed persistency ratio met threshold
- Appointment at-risk: retained
👥 Capacity
- Same 3 producers, same 6 CSRs
- Book grew 18% in the same period
- No additional headcount added
What Actually Made the Difference
When the VP of Operations was asked to identify the single biggest driver of the improvement, the answer was not a feature — it was architecture.
"We weren't doing anything dramatically different. We were still calling the same clients, reviewing the same policies, sending the same emails. We just stopped relying on people to remember things that a system should track." — VP of Operations
The underlying shift was the integrated data layer: Carrier Connect fed live policy data into Policy Manager, which triggered Renewal Automation workflows, which surfaced account status in Reports, which fed the weekly ops triage. No single module did the work — the modules worked together as one connected pipeline.
Critically, the workflow removed the human dependency from the reminder step. Producers didn't need to remember to set a reminder for each policy. The system set the reminder because it already knew when every policy expired. The producers' job became responding to structured, prioritised queues — not managing their own calendars.
Three Takeaways for Any MGA Evaluating AMS Platforms
- Retention starts with data centralization. You cannot automate what you cannot see. If renewal dates are scattered across spreadsheets and calendar reminders, no workflow tool will fix the problem — the data has to be centralized first. Carrier Connect-style feed integrations are not a convenience feature; they are a prerequisite for automation to work.
- A 90-day workflow cadence is the minimum viable intervention. For commercial lines accounts with complex coverage structures, 120 days is better. The further upstream you catch a renewal at risk, the more options you have — remarketing, coverage restructuring, proactive client contact — before the client has already gone to your competitor.
- Compliance is a workflow design problem, not a discipline problem. The agencies with the cleanest E&O records are not the ones with the most diligent staff — they are the ones whose platforms make it structurally impossible to close a file without the required documentation. Build compliance checkpoints into the workflow itself, not into a separate manual process.
👉 The carrier appointment that was at risk because of a 86% persistency ratio is now secure. The same agency, the same market, the same team — with a connected platform underneath it.
