Many leading commercial auto insurers place intense focus on being easy to do business with.  This helps them become and remain the carrier of choice to agents.  At the same time, carriers are interested in accurate and complete applications, requiring agents to undertake the often dreaded task of entering vehicle schedule data manually, including the 17-character vehicle identification number (VIN) for each vehicle in a fleet.  How do insurers balance these two seemingly conflicting interests?  Prefill technology.

This unique data service instantly "prefills" VINs and other vehicle data based on the vehicles registered to the prospect's business on the agent's screen, saving the agent the significant time and aggravation of manual data entry and turning the conversation with their customer from one of data collection to one of data verification.  This enables agents to focus on serving the customer's needs instead of ensuring all the required vehicle information has been entered in their system.

Anyone who has filled out an ACORD auto application and vehicle schedule will realize the value that prefill technology can bring to the commercial auto insurance industry.  For example, the estimated cost of data entry for the industry is 166.3 million keystrokes annually—just to enter basic vehicle details.  51.5 percent of those keystrokes are due to typing in the VIN and could be eliminated by using prefill technology. Costly errors are quickly eliminated, speeding the application process and moving a prospective customer toward a bound policy faster.