Schill Insurance was originally founded over 50 years ago in Port Coquitlam, BC. What was once a one-person office has now become a diversified insurance business with ten offices across British Columbia, offering ​​a full range of products including auto, personal lines, and commercial lines. In addition to being founded in British Columbia, both Schill Insurance and Quandri share the common trait of being family businesses founded and run by brothers. 

Consistency and scalability: The challenge of growth 

Over the past five years, Schill Insurance has experienced substantial growth, acquiring four new brokerages and achieving strong organic expansion through client referrals. One of the key objectives outlined in their strategic plan was to streamline processes to ensure a consistently excellent experience across all branches, without increasing operational burden. This initiative was crucial; successfully enabling scalability would also improve the brokerage’s ability to achieve its financial goals.

One of the main bottlenecks in their ability to efficiently service clients stemmed from a manual renewal review process conducted individually across all ten brokerages. While a crucial function for retaining clients, the time-consuming nature of the work resulted in a growing backlog. To try to solve this challenge, Schill Insurance created a team of six individuals focused solely on executing renewal reviews. While the dedicated team helped improve efficiency, the human-heavy solution still faced challenges and couldn’t scale fast enough due to the highly manual nature of work.

The search for renewal reviews automation

One day, Sara Eslami, Schill Insurance’s Chief Financial Officer, was in her office when she overheard the renewals team discussing the significant backlog and that they were feeling stressed and overwhelmed. Even with six dedicated team members, there were still only a limited number of files that they could review in a day. Sara immediately started researching to see what other brokerages were doing and if there were any renewal review automation solutions on the market. "I knew somebody must be able to automate it," said Sara. "I just didn't know who in the industry." Upon an industry recommendation, Schill discovered Quandri and their Renewal Reviews capability. 

Creating operational efficiencies with Quandri

Now, thanks to Quandri’s Renewal Reviews capability, Schill is able to automatically perform in-depth renewal reviews that meet a consistent standard across all ten of their branches. Instead of relying on subjective analysis, members of Schill’s Renwal’s team now have a truly operationalized workflow; one that has enabled them to improve the team’s capacity to quickly complete reviews, as well as provide a more proactive and informed client experience. 

With Quandri, Schill’s front-line staff reported a significant reduction in their administrative workload. They feel more empowered during client conversations due to immediate access to key policy information and proactively identified talking points. “Thanks to Quandri, our brokers can more efficiently serve a client that's calling in,” remarked Kari Schill, Retail Operations and Human Resources Manager. “They simply go to the activity and see any difference in premium coverage, if coverages have fallen off or changed, and they are now able to address those in real-time.” This results in a much more positive experience for the client on the other end of the phone.

Amid Schill’s rapid growth and expanding client and policy base, the team had faced ongoing challenges in adding skilled talent in a competitive hiring landscape. However, with Quandri’s Renewal Reviews capability, Schill has transformed its operations and the team has increased their review capacity significantly.

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This increased capacity was promptly pressure-tested at Schill when an employee on the Renewals team left for personal reasons. Thanks to the new operational standard, the remaining team members were able to absorb their departed colleague’s work without experiencing any reduction in their overall capacity.

Unlocking the productivity ripple effect 

Quandri has unlocked a new level of productivity for Schill, with its impact extending beyond the renewal team and across the entire business. “The focus of the Renewals team has shifted where they are now able to help the different branches with a wider array of tasks, in addition to reviewing renewals,” said Kari. “Their capacity has increased for other things–such as if a client calls in or we are short-staffed in a branch.” 

Other areas of the business that the Renewals team now supports include:

• Proactively reaching out to clients
• Helping with endorsements
• Rewrites
• Transactional tasks
• Taking on a book of business when someone is away

This increased capacity to take on additional work was an unexpected (but greatly appreciated) outcome for Schill, as it has helped increase staff’s ability to engage in a higher number of  meaningful client interactions. As a result, Schill believes that Quandri is and will continue to impact the brokerages ability to retain clients and, thanks to the improved visibility into key policy data, help brokers increase the average policy value per client through more informed upsell and cross-sell conversations

Scaling operational excellence into the future

From improved productivity to reduced stress levels, Schill’s Renewal team consistently reported an overall increase in their ability to proactively reach out to clients during the renewal process. “Anything we can do in our backend processes is a good thing,” explained Kari. Looking ahead to future growth, the team at Schill is confident that a consistent, scalable renewal process will further enhance how they handle M&A activities. “Acquisitions are a lot of work. When we purchase another brokerage and offer technology to the staff who did not have it before, it’s very nice.”

Having experienced the ripple effect of automation within their renewals process, Schill is now investigating ways to further utilize Quandri’s AI-enabled technology within their requoting workflow using Quandri’s Policy Requoting capability. Currently, Schill employs a fully manual requoting process, which can take a staff member upwards of half an hour to complete. As premiums continue to rise and the market continues to harden, Schill believes that automating the requoting process will have a marked impact on their business. “That one will make a huge impact. We will definitely see the results from that immediately.”