Real Estate

5 min read

How Jones Helps Property Management Teams Solve COI Collection

At the risk of stating the obvious—successfully collecting insurance documents is the biggest factor that affects compliance rates.

Whenever the Jones team onboards a new customer and conducts the initial audit, “Missing COI” and “Expired COI” errors are among the three most common reasons that records come through as non-compliant. This makes sense—you can’t review and identify policy gaps for a document you don’t have.

Helping property management and construction management teams improve COI collection is what the Jones team does for a living. After successfully retrieving hundreds of thousands of insurance docs for over 8,000 buildings, we’ve ended up with a playbook that helps us ensure a COI collection rate of over 90 percent.

In this post, we will walk you through the tactics that we see work best and also show you how Jones software puts them into action.

Nathalie Nayman

Achieving a 90%+ collection rate for insurance documents requires a combination of strategy and automation.

Here are the five strategy elements we focus on:

Note: interested in exploring how Jones can help you automate your compliance management end-to-end and de-risk your building? Talk to our team of experts today!

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Optimization of COI request emails

Right email frequency

Jones sends a series of four COI request emails—an original request to submit a COI, followed by three reminders. We arrived at this number through trial and error. After the fourth email, the chances to collect a COI are small so there is no point in continuing the follow-up and risking an unsubscribe. We also send similar sequences of emails around coverage gaps and within the month leading up to COI expiration dates. See chart below:

Branded emails

We’ve found that branded emails have higher click rates and, subsequently, higher COI submission rates (unbranded emails may look like spam to vendors). This is why Jones emails are branded—they include our clients’ logos and colors.

As you can see on the screenshot, emails also include links to relevant resources when they list coverage gaps that the insured needs to address. It helps to speed up collecting updated COIs.

*New: Contact administration

This is a new feature that we at Jones are excited to present to our prospects as well as existing customers. One of the main reasons COI collection efforts result in no response is this—you have just been emailing the wrong person or somebody who left the company.

For this reason, we automated contact administration—Jones verifies vendor company contacts and extracts insurance broker emails from COIs using OCR technology, and keeps them on file. This data is stored and viewable on Jones to benefit all our clients.

Frictionless Submission Process

Think about your COI collection process as a funnel or a leaky bucket (this is something we learned from our marketing team). At every step, more folks will drop out and leave without completing the task. The more actions vendors and tenants need to do, the more opportunities for them to give up. This is why a frictionless submission process is critical to your COI collection process.

Here is how Jones ensures an easy experience.

No-login access

Vendors, tenants, and subcontractors are not required to login in order to submit documents. They click on a COI request email and are instantly taken to the page where they can upload their documents. Easy!

Easy submission

Jones allows multiple documents to be uploaded.

*New: we also started providing submission links that don’t expire. This is important because vendors and subcontractors would frequently receive unique COIs evidencing different policies obtained from different brokers. Providing a go-to link that doesn’t expire allows the insured to come back and simply upload missing documents without needing to reach out to Jones customer support for help.

Automated Renewal Reminders

Oh, the struggle of staying on top of COI expirations, also known as the bane of any property or project manager’s existence… Fun fact—the Jones team gets on high alert during what we call ‘The Renewal Season’. Every January, we see a 30%+ increase in transaction volume.

Here’s how Jones helps you stay ahead of COI expiration dates.

An automated email is sent to tenants, vendors, and subcontractors in the following four-step sequence:

30 days before expiration
14 days before expiration
7 days before expiration
On the same day of expiration

Jones has a History Tab where you can track all the automatic email notifications and see what went out and to whom. We also have an Analytics Dashboard with aggregated compliance charts (more on this in other blog posts) where our customers can see how many COIs will expire in which month. It helps them minimize the risk and reallocate resources accordingly.

Access Nation-Wide Vendor Data on The Jones Network

You can learn about The Jones Network in more detail in other blog posts, but here is a quick explanation of what it is and how it can literally transform the COI collection.

If your company’s portfolio has several properties in the same city, chances are you’re using the same vendors to service these buildings. Here’s the problem: every property management and project management team collects COIs independently. You might be chasing a COI from a vendor while your colleagues at another property already have a COI from this same vendor on file already.

The Jones Network makes sure this doesn’t happen. You can look up a vendor in our network, and if their COI has already been collected by anybody else in your company it will be in the system. Instead of needing to request a new COI, you can simply send the existing in-network COI to be audited by Jones in just one click.

Ready to automate COI collection at your company?