Two calls for every certificate became none.

Ostrowski Insurance writes commercial lines for about 600 contractors between Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, and contractors live on certificates. A roofer cannot get on a job site without one. A general contractor will not release a check until every sub has sent theirs. In a normal week the agency issued around ninety.

None of them were hard. Each one was a holder name, a job address, sometimes an additional insured endorsement, and four minutes of a CSR’s attention in two different systems. The trouble was when they arrived: at 7:40 in the morning from a truck, or at 4:55 on a Friday, always with somebody waiting.

What the first two weeks looked like

Morgan Ostrowski connected Agencybook on a Tuesday in February, read-only, and forwarded the agency’s certificates inbox the same afternoon. For the next two weeks nothing changed for customers. Every certificate Bevel prepared sat in review mode, and one of three CSRs opened it, compared it with what they would have typed, and approved it.

They rejected four in that time. Two were holders whose legal name differed from the name in the email. One asked for a waiver of subrogation the policy did not carry. One was a request for a policy that had been cancelled the week before. Bevel had held three of the four on its own; the fourth taught it the cancelled-policy rule the agency now relies on.

We were not checking whether it was fast. We were checking whether it would ever send something we would not have.

Hands off, with a list of exceptions

Certificates went live for Heartland Assurance on March 3 and for the other eight carriers over the following month, each after its own 25 clean approvals. Today a holder’s email is answered in a median of 52 seconds. About one request in fourteen still waits for a person, and the queue says why: a holder Bevel has never seen, wording the policy does not support, a limit above what is written.

• Certificates no longer interrupt quoting. The three CSR desks got back roughly eleven hours a week between them.
• Every certificate has the email it answered and the policy data it read attached to the account.
• Renewals were switched on in May, using the same review-mode routine.

The second phone call, the one asking where the certificate is, has mostly stopped. Morgan’s measure is simpler than any of the figures: the front desk no longer keeps a paper list of who is waiting.