The 3 Most Common Problems Holding Commercial Insurance Back (and How to Fix Them)

Your goals are clear: grow your book of business, increase client retention, and improve profit margins. 

Your team is staffed with talented producers and account managers who have deep industry expertise. But are legacy processes and fragmented technology silently working against you?

In the race to stay competitive, the biggest threat isn’t always another agency - it's the internal friction caused by outdated, manual workflows. 

Over the next decade, insurance carriers have an opportunity to improve productivity and reduce operational expenses by up to 40 percent while simultaneously improving their customers’ experience, according to McKinsey.

These administrative burdens don't just drain resources; they prevent your best people from doing what they do best: advising clients and building relationships.

We spoke with commercial insurance expert Ian Berrigan about the most common operational drags he’s seen throughout his career.

 Here are the three biggest efficiency killers that might be holding your agency back, and how you can solve them with a modern tech strategy.‍

Problem 1: The Certificate Bottleneck: Delays That Frustrate Clients and Drain Your Team

For your clients in fast-moving industries like construction or auto sales, COIs are the currency of daily business. 

For your agency, they are often a low-margin, high-volume headache. 

Each request pulls your CSRs or Account Managers away from substantive work to handle a repetitive, administrative task.

For every 100 COIs that need to be tracked in your system, you could be saving 40 hours each year with a more modern process according to a study from myCOI. 

The traditional solutions are both deeply inefficient. Keeping it in-house creates a bottleneck, leading to frustrated clients asking, “Where is my certificate?” As Ian notes, “A one-day or two-day turnaround is just unacceptable” for clients who have deals on the line.

The other option, offshoring, can cut costs but introduces quality control issues and can be a red flag for sophisticated clients.

• The Fix: Transition certificate issuance from a people-powered task to a tech-enabled workflow. The goal is to free your expert staff from the copy-paste cycle and allow them to focus on high-value client consultations, risk management, and uncovering cross-selling opportunities.
• The Tech Solution: This process is perfectly suited for AI-powered automation. An integrated system can read an incoming email request, parse the requirements, verify them against the client’s policy in your AMS, and generate a compliant COI in minutes. This not only slashes your internal costs but also becomes a powerful competitive advantage. While your competition promises a 24-hour turnaround, you can deliver in under 5 minutes.‍

Problem 2: The Submission Bottleneck: Manual Work That Slows Growth and Costs You Business

How many non-billable hours does your team spend preparing underwriter submissions? 

The process is a clear example of inefficiency: gathering client data, manually entering it into your AMS, and then painstakingly copying and pasting that same information into various carrier-specific portals and supplemental applications.

Ian calls this the "underwriter submission bottleneck," a clunky process that creates a major drag on your sales cycle. 

Every hour a producer or their assistant spends on redundant data entry is another hour they aren't prospecting or advising clients, which means lost revenue opportunities. 

This grind doesn’t just limit your team’s capacity; it limits the number of markets you can realistically approach for each risk, meaning you might not always be securing the absolute best terms for your client.

• The Fix: Establish a “collect once, use many times” data strategy for all submissions. Your client’s information should live in a single source of truth that can be deployed across multiple carrier applications seamlessly, without manual re-entry.
• The Tech Solution: Custom AI and automation can serve as the central nervous system connecting your AMS to your carriers. By building intelligent workflows, you can pull client data once and have it automatically populate the myriad of required forms. You can transform submission prep from a multi-hour manual task into a minutes-long, review-and-send process, dramatically increasing your agency’s throughput.

Problem 3: The Renewal Scramble: Last-Minute Chaos That Erodes Trust

Renewals should be the most profitable and predictable part of your business. Instead, they’re often a chaotic, last-minute scramble. 

Your team is chasing down updated exposures, re-filling out applications, and trying to manually compare a 100-page expiring policy against several equally dense renewal quotes.

This reactive process is a recipe for client frustration, often culminating in painful surprises like the  massive audit bill from an under-projected quote made a year prior. 

Nearly 45% of commercial insurance customers have data inaccuracies in critical areas like business activities and addresses at renewal [3], which makes the last-minute scramble even riskier.

When the renewal conversation is spent justifying past problems, you’ve already lost. 

• The Fix: Systematize your renewal process to turn it from a reactive administrative chore into a proactive, high-value strategic consultation. Use the renewal as your best annual opportunity to demonstrate expertise and solidify your client relationship.
• The Tech Solution: AI tools are exceptionally good at forensic document analysis. A custom solution can perform a side by side comparison on policy documents, instantly highlighting every single textual change - from endorsements and forms to the definitions in the fine print. This eliminates the E&O risk of missing a critical change and frees your producers to focus on what matters: advising the client on the strategic implications of those changes.

Stop Patching, Start Integrating

These three bottlenecks are not isolated issues. They are symptoms of a fragmented tech stack where different systems fail to communicate, forcing your expert team to act as the inefficient, manual bridge between them.

The solution isn't another off-the-shelf SaaS product that solves one problem but integrates with nothing else. The future of agency efficiency lies in building a single, cohesive operational backbone that automates the mundane and empowers your people to do what they do best.

If you’re unsure where to start, begin with a workflow audit. Map out how certificates, submissions, and renewals currently move through your agency, and make a plan to remove the biggest bottlenecks first.

You've taken the first step and performed a workflow audit. Now, let's turn those insights into an action plan.

‍Book your free tailored Commercial Insurance Workshop.