Standard: documented annual review

Every other practice standard operates at a moment: the quote, the recommendation, the declination, the claim. Each one catches a decision as it is made.

This one catches everything the others could not have known about, because it did not exist yet. The new driver. The renovation. The business that grew out of a hobby. The paid-off mortgage. The grandchildren and the pool.

Every active client is offered a coverage review at least once a year. The offer is logged whether or not the client accepts.

The second sentence is the entire standard. The first sentence is what most agencies believe they already do.

Offered, not completed

The distinction is deliberate and it is what makes the standard workable.

An agency cannot compel a client to sit down for a review. Many will decline, some repeatedly, and an agency should not be penalised for a client’s choice not to engage.

What an agency entirely controls is whether the offer was made. So that is what the standard measures.

This also removes the perverse incentive a completion-based standard would create: an agency judged on reviews completed has a reason to stop offering to the clients least likely to accept — who are frequently the ones whose coverage has drifted furthest.

Why the log is the standard

An agency that believes it reviews its book annually and has no record of the offers cannot demonstrate it, cannot measure it, and almost certainly is not doing it uniformly.

The log produces three things nothing else does.

Coverage of the book, as a number. What percentage of active clients received an offer in the last twelve months? Agencies guess high on this and are almost always wrong, because the clients who go quiet are invisible precisely when they should be visible.

An E&O position. A logged, dated offer to review coverage — declined by the client — is a meaningful document if the adequacy of that coverage is ever questioned.

A working queue. A log is by definition a list of who has not been contacted yet. Without it, the review programme runs on whoever happens to call in, which is the opposite of a programme.

Why it is the hardest standard to keep

Not because it is complicated. Because it is continuous.

A declination letter is triggered by an event — a client declined something, produce the document. The annual review has no trigger. Nothing happens to prompt it. It only occurs if someone builds a system that generates the prompt.

And it competes, every single day, with work that is genuinely more urgent: new business, service requests, claims. The review always looks deferrable, and it always is deferrable, one week at a time, for a year.

The agencies that keep this standard are not more disciplined. They have built something that raises the work automatically.

Implementing it

Anchor to a date the system already knows. Renewal is the obvious one — it is the natural moment, the client is already thinking about the policy, and the trigger is automatic. Some agencies use policy anniversary or client anniversary instead; the choice matters less than the fact that the system emits it without anyone deciding.

Log the offer, not the outcome. One field: offered, date, channel. If logging requires a narrative note, it will not survive a busy week.

Define what counts as an offer and be consistent. A personalised email inviting a review is an offer. A bulk marketing send is not. The standard’s value comes from the client actually having had a chance to engage.

Use a structured agenda. A review with no agenda becomes a chat about the premium. A short standing list — drivers, vehicles, property changes, valuables, business activity, liability limits, declined coverages from last year — makes a fifteen-minute call productive and repeatable by anyone in the agency.

Run the exception report weekly. Who is inside the window and has not been offered? That report is the standard’s enforcement mechanism, and reviewing it is somebody’s named job or nobody’s.

What a review should actually cover

Start with last year’s declinations. This is the highest-yield item and almost nobody does it: last year you declined an umbrella and water backup. Here is what changed since. Do you want to look again?

Then the changes the client will not volunteer — the ones in the diagram above. Ask directly rather than asking whether anything has changed, because “anything changed?” reliably returns “no” from households that added a driver and finished a basement.

Then the limits, briefly. Liability, UM/UIM, dwelling replacement cost. All three drift.

Then close it the same way you close a sale: whatever was recommended and declined generates a declination letter, and the log records that the review happened.

What to check in your own agency

Pick a month at random from last year. Pull every active client whose renewal fell in it. What proportion have a logged review offer?

If you cannot answer that question from your system in a few minutes, the log does not exist yet — and the log is the standard.