How Houchens Insurance Group Found Peace of Mind (and Massive Efficiency Gains) with Outmarket AI

For many insurance professionals, the holiday season isn't just about family and festivities. It's a stressful period packed with massive renewals and complex policy checks. But this past year, the team at Houchens Insurance Group (HIG) experienced something entirely new.

"This is the first year that I've ever heard people say that they could actually go to their Christmas dinner," shared Brian Woodward, a member of the Solutions Team at HIG. He noted that account managers could finally look "their family in the eyes and not have insurance on the back of their mind".

This peace of mind wasn't a coincidence; it was the direct result of Houchens adopting Outmarket AI to accelerate their workflows, catch critical errors, and scale their agency without adding stress.

The Challenge: Finding an AI That Truly Understands Insurance

Houchens has a strong ethos of continuous improvement and has always had a forward-thinking approach to technology. However, dealing with massive policy documents manually was taking its toll. Brian noted that checking policies from a purely human standpoint was too slow and left far too much room for costly errors. When a human checks document after document, the quality inevitably declines over time.

The agency had experimented with other AI tools, but they ultimately fell short. The previous AI they tried "just wasn't accurate" because it lacked crucial "insurance background and the knowledge". Furthermore, other platforms didn't allow the agency to interact with the analyzed policy to mold the outcome. HIG needed a solution that was insurance-specific, customizable, and capable of keeping a "human in the loop" to automate their operations properly.

The Solution: A True Partnership and Custom Rollout

When Brian's team evaluated Outmarket, they quickly recognized it as a "product that could change the industry". But what truly set the experience apart from past solutions was the highly collaborative onboarding and rollout process.

The Outmarket team flew out from California to spend several days with HIG, intentionally listening to the specific perspectives of producers, marketers, and service managers. "In my 15 years of all my evaluations, nobody has wanted the perspective of our business like [Outmarket] did," Brian explained.

By understanding exactly how HIG operated, Outmarket molded the workflows to HIG's specific needs. Because the platform was customized and made so user-friendly, there was essentially no big learning curve for the staff to overcome.

The Results: Dropping Errors, Boosting Efficiency

The impact of Outmarket was immediate and profound across the entire agency. On their very first test of the software, Outmarket uncovered an error that "absolutely could have prevented an E&O [Errors & Omissions] claim". Because Outmarket "doesn't stop" and "keeps going," it continually catches errors within large, complicated documents that tired human eyes might miss.

By embedding Outmarket deeply into their marketing, customer service, and accounting teams, HIG achieved incredible operational and financial results, as echoed by Scott Robinson, CFO at HIG:

• Massive Reduction in Errors: HIG's E&O exposure dropped dramatically, plummeting from a previous 40% down to roughly 17%.

• Unprecedented Efficiency Gains: The agency saw a staggering 50% year-over-year increase in their tracked efficiency ratio in March alone.

• Faster Task Execution: In one remarkable example, an employee processed 61 Certificates of Insurance (COIs) in just 3 hours using Outmarket. Doing this manually used to take four to four-and-a-half days—a 90% reduction in time.

• Winning Back Business: Outmarket's policy comparison features helped HIG analyze a competitor's winning bid, identify coverage gaps, and write a targeted proposal in a matter of hours instead of days. This allowed the agency to win the client back two weeks later. To date, HIG attributes winning at least three to five new clients directly to insights produced by Outmarket.

• Scaling Without Adding Headcount: The immense time savings have allowed HIG to absorb growth and handle staff departures without the need to hire replacements, all while dramatically improving employee happiness and retention.

Looking Ahead

For Houchens Insurance Group, Outmarket isn't just a software tool, it's a critical component of their long-term strategic growth. The agency has an ambitious set of goals for the years ahead, and Brian believes that "the only way we get there is with Outmarket".

As Brian summarized: Companies that "are not looking forward, they will 100% be left behind". By partnering with Outmarket, HIG isn't just keeping up; they are actively "setting the standard" for what the future of the insurance industry will look like.