Safeco Will Jumpstart Distributors’ Online Productivity

Seattle-based Safeco has taken the next big step toward fulfilling its mission of making the experience of buying, selling and owning insurance easier than anyone else.

Safeco (www.safeco.com) has launched Safeco Now for Property/Casualty insurance – an online sales platform that integrates personal and small-commercial insurance products, reportedly saving independent distributors time and driving increased cross-selling opportunities.

Safeco Now is a new streamlined Web site for independent agents and brokers that gives them access to 90 percent of their daily online work tools with just one click. But the reported highlight of the system is the much-anticipated single-platform sales tool that allows distributors to quote and bind – in just minutes – seven major lines of P/C and Surety business:

Personal Auto *
Homeowners *
Business Owners Policy (BOP)
Commercial Auto (fleet and non-fleet)
Workers’ Compensation
Business Umbrella
Surety (notary; license and permit bonds; court bonds; public official bonds)
All major product lines – from Personal Watercraft to Commercial Multi-Peril – will come online by the end of 2005. Commercial Multi-Peril will begin its rollout during the fourth quarter of this year.

The single-platform interface is an expansion of the company’s small-business sales tool introduced last year. That new-business interface reportedly proved so easy for agents that BOP sales in 2003 jumped 50 percent, and Commercial Auto climbed 39 percent, since its introduction on to the system last summer.

Wrapped around the new-business hub is a menu of online tools for agents to use in delivering customer service – from claims and billing inquiry to policy changes. And supporting it all will be a leading-edge security service, set for introduction during the second half of 2004.