Two weeks of watching before it sent a thing.

Pfeiffer & Ruhl has been at the same counter in Fort Wayne since 1988. Seven people, about 1,400 policies, most of them small commercial accounts whose owners the two partners know by first name. Casey Pfeiffer describes the agency’s errors-and-omissions record the way other people describe a clean driving record.

That record is why two earlier automation pitches went nowhere. Both promised to issue certificates automatically. Neither could answer Casey’s first question, which was what happens the first time it is wrong.

Approving every run

Review mode was the answer Casey had been asking for. When the agency connected Policydesk in March, Bevel prepared each certificate and then stopped. A CSR opened the run, saw the holder’s email on one side and the finished certificate on the other, and clicked approve or reject.

The rule is 25 clean approvals in a row, per carrier, and one rejection resets the count. Pfeiffer & Ruhl reset it twice. Once for a holder with two legal entities at the same address, and once because a CSR rejected a correct certificate to see what would happen. The count went back to zero, as it should.

The second reset is the one that convinced me. It did exactly what it said it would when we tried to trip it.

Six months on

Certificates went live in April for six carriers. Endorsements followed in June, starting with vehicle changes for the agency’s trucking and landscaping accounts. Each of those ran its own 25.

• No certificate has had to be corrected and reissued since go-live.
• The audit log has been pulled once, for a carrier’s routine review, and answered every question in it.
• Two CSRs each have about two and a half hours a day they did not have in February.

What the agency did with those hours is the part Casey likes to talk about. One CSR now calls every commercial account 60 days before renewal. The other finished her licensing in August. The counter is as busy as it was, and nobody at it is typing into a carrier portal.