An Inside Look At our COI Tracking Services

COI Management | September 13, 2022

If you’re thinking about moving your COI Tracking services to a vendor or changing your current vendor, it can be a difficult decision. After all, with any vendor relationship, you want to ensure that the process will work best for your needs and add value but that can be a challenge when something is new. Because of this, we wanted to give you an inside look at our COI Tracking Services from a high level. Our COI Tracking Service takes on all the responsibility, not just obtaining the COI but handling contractor and insurance agent questions around your requirements. 

Renewal Notices

Starting 30 days prior to expiration we begin to contact both the insurance agent and the contractor asking them to submit a certificate of insurance. When requesting, we include details that are specific to your requirements, including an example of what to submit. A critical part of our process is to work with the agent while keeping your contractor in the loop, because:

1. We understand that your contractor is busy and we want to make their job as easy as possible.
2. The insurance agent better understands what we are requesting. Our team is trained to understand and speak at the same level as their agent.

We’ve often been asked why we don’t send out a 60-day notice. It’s not until 30 days prior to expiration that the contractor typically receives the bill to renew their insurance. This reduces the confusion on whether we are asking for a current or renewal COI. 

Our COI Renewal Process

COI Submission

We recognize that making the process as easy as possible is the key. We don’t expect agents or contractors to recall how to submit or even remember their login information when providing an occasional COI. As such, we provide multiple ways to send in documentation, including:

• Document upload through Smartlinks in renewal and email notices to insurance agents and contractors
• Document upload in our Company Portal for contractors
• Document upload in our Insight Portal for our clients
• Email and fax

We do encourage document upload since this assigns the document to an account and ensures the likelihood of following the happy path. To make this as simple as possible, we include an upload link in all our communication, including the renewal notices for both the agent and contractor to easily upload and submit. 

We also provide the ability for our clients to upload documents and assign them to a contractor through our Insight web-based portal. 

Our Document Upload

Account Review & Verification

When we receive a COI or any insurance documentation such as endorsements or policy pages, we will review the account in its entirety and reach out to the agent and contractor to notify them that we received proof of insurance and that the account meets your requirements or what action is needed to complete the requirements.  

Knowing that everyone is busy and has little time to read emails, much less lengthy documentation, we have taken steps to make the request for insurance revisions as simple and clear as possible.  

Notice Requesting Revisions

Revisions

As revised COIs and documentation is received the account continues to go through the review process until it is compliant with your requirements.  

We’ve found that the revision period for many of our clients took them the longest, but PlusOne Solutions has been able to reduce time spent on this step by simplifying our communication, the ease to submit documents, as well as working directly with the agent. In addition, our turnaround time on processing documents is hours or less, making this step less burdensome.

Verification

Receiving cancellations and knowing when a contractor has switched insurance agents or carriers can be a challenge. We help alleviate this by doing periodic verifications with the insurance agent. Not only do we identify issues when we receive an initial COI, but we check in with the agent 30 days after receiving proof of a policy and again mid-way through the policy term. 

Reporting

We all know that metrics is the key to effectively running any program, this is no different behind a successful COI Tracking Program. As such, reporting becomes critical so that you understand both at a granular and high level where your contractors and your entire network stand when it comes to compliance. We provide multiple options to receive reporting.

Insight Client Portal

Our Insight Client Portal is a 24/7 web-based portal that can be accessed by any device to review details on individual contractors or from a network level. From our overall compliance graph, you can drill into see contractors who are compliant and those who are not. 

After drilling into the graph, you can view your entire network. We have several filters that can be used to identify what you are looking for, such as in or out of compliance, state that the contractor is in. and even a contractor ID that you may have assigned to them. You can drill in even further to a specific contractor to identify each piece required for compliance.

Insight also provides the ability to download all reporting, including policies that are coming up for expiration or that have expired. 

Insight Contractor Drill-Down

API & Integrations

If you are looking to further streamline the process, we provide simple APIs that allow you to push and pull data between your system and ours. We also provide more basic integrations, knowing that not all systems yet use APIs. Some advantages, but not all, of using an API or integration:

• Allows your team the ability to work entirely out of your existing system
• Allows you to activate and inactive your contractors from your system
• More timely retrieval of insurance data

Contents are provided for information purposes only and should not be construed as legal advice. Users are reminded to seek legal counsel with respect to their obligations and use of PlusOne Solutions services.

About PlusOne Solutions

PlusOne Solutions help businesses create safer working environments and protect companies from the associated financial, legal, or reputational risks of hiring contractors and vendors. To learn more about how PlusOne Solutions can help an organization with COI management, visit https://www.PlusOneSolutions.net.