After announcing West Coast Life’s planned term insurance rate increase a few days ago and the following up yesterday with a summary of their rules for transition to the new rates I queried West Coast about the huge discrepancy in time allowed between agents in the field and their in house Telelife process.
Clearly giving us two weeks to have applications signed and three weeks for them to be in the home office is not on a level playing field with Telelife having two months to get the application and exam done. I shot a question out to Greg Zabel, the author of the memo, to see if perhaps there was some mistake or perhaps there might be some room for negotiating a more equal treatment.
His answer was that since Telelife doesn’t have a lot of control over getting exams done or applications back in West Coast felt they should be given more time. So let me explain a bit more about Telelife.
Telelife is a service that West Coast Life provides to agents who don’t want to do the work of sending out applications and ordering exams. Once the agent has made a sale he turns his client over to Telelife. They create the application and send it out and then they order the exam. It’s still up to the agent to make sure the application gets signed and returned and the exam gets done. For the record we don’t use Telelife and we have about a 10 day turnaround on applications and exams, mostly having to do with finding a workable exam date.
So, I’m thinking it is truly a pathetic excuse for an agent who would need an extra 5-6 weeks more than me to get an application and exam back in, and West Coast Life is giving them the slack??
Anyway, just me having a little whine with my rate change. It won’t impact my ability to serve my clients. Thought it might be useful for anyone that comes across an agent that is big on a process called Telelife.
Bottom line. That rate change is coming no matter what, another nail in the downward term insurance rate coffin. If you’re dragging your feet on the decision to get life insurance you may end up very disappointed in a pair of worn out shoes and higher rates to go with them.
June 3rd, 2009
A potential life insurance client was interviewing me the other day and asked why he should put confidence in my quote for a better rate on term life insurance than he was currently paying. Certainly a fair question and one that goes right to the meat of our business model.
Any independent agent out there with access to the right companies and their underwriting criteria can provide accurate quotes to people with no health history and no family history, most of the time. But anytime their is a health issue that falls outside normal guidelines our practice is to always, always shop for trial offers. We don’t shoot from the hip on these kind of quotes ever. Just because an underwriter approved a similar case a month ago doesn’t mean we can count on a repeat.
That agent may have given our client a good approval and when audited lost a portion of their rear end to the chief underwriter or to the medical director. Or that agent may just wake up grumpy the next time and decide everyone that day is scarier than they are when he or she is well rested. In any case I never put stock in a previous success other than to make sure I get a new trial offer from that company.
Case in point. I had a client not too long ago that came to me with a unique cholesterol issue. Normal total cholesterol and a very low HDL, giving him a cholesterol ratio of over 8. He said that it had been historically that way and that his doctor monitors it and had not recommended any treatment. I researched the issue and then sent out the following trial email, “PI born 1/16/60, 6′3, 185, non smoker. On previous insurance exam had total cholesterol 169, hdl 19, ldl 120, trigs 146. PI has historically tested low on hdl and doctor has not treated due to no other risk factors for CAD. PI exercises daily. All articles I’ve seen linking low hdl to ischemic heart disease are when it is in conjunction with elevated triglycerides or diabetes, neither of which he has. Looking for $250k term.” PI, by the way, is proposed insured.
This was met with a number of standard rate to table rated offers, with one exception. Transamerica gave me a trial offer of preferred. We applied and the client completed the exam. Within hours of the new labs reaching the Trans home office they emailed and said that the best case would be standard because of his cholesterol ratio of 7.8. I responded noting to the underwriter that it should still be preferred per their trial since the ratio was nearly 8.9 based on the total of 169 and HDL of 19 on the trial.
Long story short. The underwriter on the trial had not done their math and had quoted it incorrectly, but given the clarity of my request and the clarity of their trial offer, Transamerica stood by the offer and issued the policy at preferred saving the client several hundred dollars.
Bottom line. Quoting and applying without the benefit of trial offers is at best throwing it against the wall and hoping it will stick. Clients deserve better than that and it helps agents and underwriters to build reliable relationships. A case like this would have been bad news for the client with no trial to fall back on.
June 3rd, 2009
