When agents think about a company’s strength or weakness, what comes to mind first is how a company delivers on products and pricing. That’s what PIA’s Company Performance Survey will show; the full results to be in the October issue of PIA magazine.

Meanwhile, this final article on the PIA Benchmark Survey focuses on pricing, products and insurers’ marketing activity—three components of company performance that closely relate to agents’ sales. Earlier articles in this series looked at claims-handling (rated most important in the PIA Benchmark Survey), underwriting, communication and service issues and technology.

Agents’ concern with market-related factors may stem from the current cut-throat environment. “It is now a TOTALLY price-driven market and will be for at least a year,” commented one benchmark survey participant in March 2009. Echoed another: “Now, and for the foreseeable future, there is only one factor in this now commoditized market—PRICE.”

Despite their focus on premiums, agents who named a specific company’s “main strength” in the Company Performance Survey were slightly more likely (by 19 percent to 15 percent) to identify a product feature than good pricing. When asked in the Benchmark Survey about broad categories of company performance, agents rated “products and pricing” second only to “claims handling.” Out of a total 456 agents in the survey, 254 (56 percent), said they consider products and pricing a “10”—meaning it’s of highest importance to them when evaluating a company relationship.

In somewhat of an anomaly, however, the specific performance items belonging to this category didn’t make the Benchmark Survey’s top-10 list of highest priority items. “Competitive pricing” was number 15; “superior coverage” ranked number 18. Company marketing activity rated less important to agents.

The following are relevant Benchmark Survey items, in order of importance to agents. They are ranked according to how many (out of 456) rated them a 10—the highest “importance” rating on the study’s 1-to-10 scale. The percentage figures show the number of 10s as a percent of the item’s total scores: competitive pricing (224 respondents, 49 percent); superior coverage (190, 42 percent); product diversity (111, 24 percent); and advertises, recognized brand (74, 16 percent).

About the 2009 PIA Benchmark Survey. The survey asked agents to rate 35 separate company performance criteria. Using a 1-to-10 scale, 456 respondents scored each item, according to its importance in evaluating their relationship with a company.

The 35 items included the 16 standard items used in Company Performance Survey, and results helped reshape this annual study. In particular, relatively lackluster “importance” ratings for the standard marketing performance items prompted a complete re-write of this section of the survey for 2009, to include two new items: “brand helps sell product” and “marketing message supports agents.” Throughout the survey’s seven year history in New York, agent comments suggest they take note of these factors.-Kiehl