If you do not currently bundle all of your business insurance policies with one carrier, you may want to revisit your coverages. Insurance carriers realize the many benefits of offering additional lines of coverage to an existing customer, but what’s in it for the customer?
Bundling commercial insurance policies is highly beneficial to customers. Similar to how bundling your personal home and auto policies may give you a discount, bundling your business policies can provide discounts and benefits way beyond just cost savings.
Simplified bookkeeping
Most businesses require a number of insurance policies to make sure their operations are properly insured, including:
- General Liability: In Ohio, General Liability Insurance, often referred to as Business Liability Insurance, forms the foundation of protection for most businesses and their insurance portfolio. This policy protects businesses from most liability exposures, with the exception of auto and professional services.
- Commercial Property: This policy protects commercial property from such perils as fire, theft and natural disaster. This type of insurance is carried by a variety of businesses, including manufacturers, retailers, service-oriented businesses and not-for-profit organizations.
- Professional Liability and E&O: In Ohio, Professional Liability Insurance, also known as Errors & Omissions (E&O) Insurance, is liability insurance designed to protect those individuals and businesses providing professional advice. In the insurance world, General Liability Insurance exists to pay for the bodily harm or property damage a business is responsible for causing while Professional Liability is protection in the event the business causes harm because of the advice or guidance provided. Depending on your type of business, you could need one, or both of these coverages.
- Commercial Auto: A Commercial Auto Policy can be used to insure vehicles for liability to protect the business owner in the event of an at-fault accident, physical damage to the vehicles owned by the business, or both. With the exception of auto dealerships, auto repair operations, trucking firms or other auto-related businesses, the Commercial Auto Policy addresses the needs of most businesses.
- Business Interruption: Also known as Business Income Insurance, this policy is designed to cover the loss of income a business suffers after a disaster. It’s important to note that whatever disaster causes the business to lose income must be a covered claim before Business Income Insurance will respond.
- Cyber Liability: These policies cover a business’ liability for a data breach in which the firm’s customers’ personal information, such as Social Security or credit card numbers, is exposed or stolen by a hacker or other criminal who has gained access to the firm’s electronic network.
- Directors and Officers: In Ohio, Directors & Officers Liability Insurance (sometimes referred to as D&O Insurance) is designed to protect the directors and officers of an organization. In addition, D&O insurance can also help protect the organization in the event of a lawsuit.
Keeping up with so many policies isn’t an easy task for business owners. Therefore, bundling multiple policies with the same carrier simplifies things for bookkeeping purposes. Besides having fewer bills to keep track of every month, it also makes it easier come renewal time if the bundled policies renew at the same time each year.
Your HR department will also appreciate having one number to call when you’re hiring a new employee, have claims questions, are adding a location or making any other business decisions that impact your insurance.
One point of contact
Properly insuring your business requires explaining to your insurance agent exactly what your business does and the exposures that come with it. But without bundling insurance policies, you have more agents to educate, which takes time. The fewer agents you have to work with, the better equipped they’ll be to help identify and address your exposures.
In addition, if you want to file a claim, make a change to a policy, ask questions about your policy, etc. you have one person that you can contact who is familiar with your policies and business.
Assurance that your policies work together
There may be circumstances when two of your business insurance policies have to work together. For example, you may assume that something not covered by your commercial auto policy would be covered by your commercial umbrella policy. However, many umbrella policies will only extend above an auto policy if the insurance company offering it has a specified financial strength rating. If your carrier’s rating falls below a certain grade, your umbrella policy may not cover an auto loss. That’s just one type of problem that could arise if you keep your policies under separate roofs, with separate agents.
Less security risk
When obtaining insurance, business owners are required to divulge sensitive personal information about their employees, as well as financial information about the business itself. When dividing your policies among multiple agents, you’re basically providing all that information to more people than you would have to if you’d bundled your policies with one agent. And in doing so, you’re increasing the risk of highly sensitive information ending up in the wrong hands.
Better pricing
Bundling insurance your business’s insurance policies allows your insurance professional to give you access to multiline discounts that help boost your bottom line. Contact CoverLink Insurance to see if any of your insurers offer multiline discounts. We can give you estimates for bundling insurance your policies with each of our carriers, as well.
Conclusion
It’s important to choose the right insurance company to help you make these complex decisions about protecting your business.
You’ve probably realized by now. We’re pretty big believers in doing what’s best for our clients. After all, CoverLink has been obsessively protecting and caring for its clients since 1920. We believe that people are more important than policies, and that’s how we think our clients should be treated. We care deeply about our clients, and about protecting everything that’s important to them.
If this sounds like your cup of tea, we’d love to connect with you.