29 May 2025

How to Quote Faster and Win More Business: The Power of Comparative Raters

For independent insurance agents, manual quoting across multiple carrier portals quickly becomes a time sink, costing you deals. Not to mention that repetitive and error-prone manual processes can raise issues with inconsistent pricing and delayed responses, leading to more missed opportunities. In an industry where speed and success go hand in hand, manual approaches put agents at a significant disadvantage.

Comparative raters are designed to help address these issues – but not all raters are created equally. Insurance gents need a smart, fast way to deliver quotes and win customer trust in a highly competitive market.

Why Speed and Accuracy Matter in Insurance Quoting

Today’s insurance customer expects immediate results. Studies suggest that 55% of customers (68% in younger people) prefer to work through digital channels – and 40% of those customers will look elsewhere if agents can’t meet that expectation. Comparative rating tools play an essential role for insurance agents, allowing them to gather quotes from more carriers and offer key digital services.

However, it’s not just about choice or channel. As much as half of sales are proven to go to the first agent that can offer a quote, with companies that respond within an hour seven times more likely to qualify the lead – more than 60 times more likely to convert than when companies respond within 24 hours. After 48 hours, the opportunity is as good as gone.

This is a significant problem for independent agents. Every minute you spend repeating the same information over quote software for independent agents is a minute your competition could be using to close the deal.

Speed isn’t just about convenience. It shows professionalism and respect for the customer’s time. Losing the momentum of the quoting process means the customer will look elsewhere or lose interest entirely.

Comparative Raters: The Solution to Manual Reworking

Here is where insurance comparative raters play a role. Comparative raters are specialized software, allowing agents to enter relevant information once, but still gather quotes from multiple carriers simultaneously. They streamline the quoting process and reduce rework. This gives the agent a single interface to use to communicate with different insurance companies’ rating engines, sparing them from repetitive and redundant data entry.

While convenience and time-saving are key, the best insurance comparative raters offer several other key factors:

Consistency: Eliminate human error in data entry across multiple systems
Efficiency: Reduce quoting time from hours to minutes
Comprehensiveness: Present customers with multiple options in one sitting
Professionalism: Position agents as tech-savvy and customer-focused

Yet, not all insurance comparative raters deliver on this promise. Agents often struggle with poorly designed questionnaires asking irrelevant questions, limited carrier integrations that still leave them reliant on manual quoting, and overall poor user experiences that ramp up frustration.

The best insurance comparative raters should eliminate these pain points, not create new ones. The real question is how to evaluate quoting platforms for independent agencies, and make sure your comparative rater is delivering on the key goals of simpler, better, and faster.

How bolt has Committed to Comparative Rater Excellence

As a quoting platform for independent agencies, bolt understands how many of these frustrations complicate agent workflows. After all, even the best insurance comparative raters can always improve, especially as technology develops.

This was part of the reason bolt introduced the Dynamic Quoting Questionnaire. One of the key time wasters in most quoting software for insurance agents lies in the initial data-gathering stage. Conventional preset forms for comparative raters typically rely on set questions, regardless of other data or circumstances. This leads to time spent entering redundant or irrelevant information – and as we’ve seen, the clock is ticking on turning that potential customer into a real lead.

Let’s take a closer look at how bolt’s Dynamic Quoting Questionnaire works.

Real-Time Carrier Filtering

As customer information is entered, the Dynamic Quoting Questionnaire automatically narrows carrier options to those relevant to their specific risk profile and needs. This means agents aren’t wasting time quoting carriers that will ultimately decline or use punitive and non-competitive rates.

Intelligent Question Flow

The Dynamic Quoting Questionnaire eliminates unnecessary questions, only asking what is relevant to the customer and the filtered carriers. Should a customer’s data disqualify them from certain carriers, those questions are removed, streamlining the process and letting agents get quotes out the door 20% faster.

Third-Party Data Integration

To further streamline the process, bolt’s quoting platform for independent agencies also leverages third-party data to pre-fill answers. This helps to reduce the data entry burden on the agent. This could be information like vehicle statistics or property characteristics. This integration helps to accelerate the quoting process significantly.

Focused Results

Together, this means bolt’s comparative rating tools produce only relevant quotes from carriers genuinely interested in the customer’s business. This helps agents spend their valuable time nurturing viable opportunities and improving their customer responsiveness.

This dynamic approach to quoting platforms for independent agencies lets agents quote faster using comparative raters, while reducing (and even eliminating) many of the traditional pain points of comparative raters. Agents face less rework, higher accuracy, and a faster quote-to-bind cycle designed to support them and the customer’s needs. Faster closes, higher customer satisfaction, and fewer quoting errors follow.

bolt’s Quoting Platform for Independent Agencies in Action

Let’s examine a real-world case where a personal lines broker turned to bolt’s quoting platform for independent agencies. This bolt partner was experiencing significant growth challenges, held back by manual quoting processes and the accompanying inefficiencies.

Once they partnered with bolt as their insurance comparative rater, they were able to successfully launch a fully digital insurance platform, seeing:

Streamlined workflows that saved significant agent time
Seamless integration of multiple carriers in a single, unified, digital quoting platform
Improved customer experiences with faster, more intuitive quoting

This resulted in a 113% increase in their quoted premiums over a single year.

Selecting the Best Comparative Raters for Small Insurance Agencies: Your Key Takeaways

If you’re looking to put comparative rating tools to work for you, it’s time to step away from inefficient quoting processes and embrace everything the best insurance comparative raters can offer you. Here’s how to get started.

Stop the redundancy cycle: Every minute spent re-entering data is a minute not spent selling or servicing customers, and it’s time to put quote software for insurance agents to work for you. Redundant applications don’t drive business.
Choose technology wisely: Not all comparative raters deliver equal value. Seek solutions that adapt to each unique customer journey, like bolt’s Dynamic Quoting Questionnaire, rather than forcing customers into rigid questionnaires.
Prioritize integration capabilities: The best comparative rating tools should connect seamlessly with your agency management system and leverage third-party data sources for an improved overall experience.
Measure the impact: Track your quote turnaround times and conversion rates before and after implementing a new solution to quantify the business impact.

With the right quoting platform for independent agencies to support you, you can eliminate unnecessary steps and focus your energy where it matters the most. Partnering with bolt for a smarter workflow gives you the quoting edge you need to drive real business success.

If you’re interested to learn how bolt can help transform your quoting process, contact us today.